Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues wasn’t written for this era, but damn if it didn’t feel like it. Chaotic, fast, relentless. The kind of song that doesn’t wait for you to catch up. The kind of song that, even if you don’t understand every word, you feel it. That rapid-fire delivery—so urgent, so raw—matched the energy of a world unraveling in real time. Every day, a new crisis. Every minute, a new breaking story. Every second, a fresh reason to panic.
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
But in 2020, the wind wasn’t just blowing—it was unraveling.
A gust of panic, a rush of headlines, a world tilting too fast for anyone to find their footing.
It started as a whisper, a ripple in the distance—then a wave.
Two weeks, they said. Just a pause. Just a moment to catch our breath.
But the world inhaled, and when it exhaled, everything had changed.
The streets emptied. The doors shut. The static swallowed the silence.
Stay home. Stay apart. Stay afraid.
Or—
Look closer. See through the cracks.
Because the cracks were everywhere, and the truth was shifting like smoke.
The airwaves hummed with contradictions—same song, different verse.
Wear this. Don’t wear this. Trust this. Fear that.
The rules changed mid-sentence, and no one seemed to notice.
We weren’t driving anymore—just passengers on a train with no stops, no conductor, no clear destination.
A loop of flashing numbers, scrolling warnings, voices crashing into one another until everything blurred into white noise.
And just as the world went quiet, the streets exploded.
Fires, protests, anger spilling over like a dam had finally cracked.
A summer of movement, of voices demanding to be heard.
An election looming like a storm cloud.
Everything felt inevitable, everything felt uncertain.
Everything felt like something out of a movie.
The world was coming undone at the seams, and suddenly, I was eight years old again, sitting cross-legged on the floor, listening to my dad unravel the mysteries of the universe—government cover-ups, shadowy figures pulling the strings, the kind of theories that seemed too wild to be true, until suddenly, they didn’t. His voice echoed in my head through the static of 2020, through the chaos of lockdowns and shifting narratives, the flickering news cycles that felt less like reporting and more like a script we weren’t meant to question. We talked more than ever then—long, winding conversations where past and present blurred, where his old warnings suddenly felt prophetic. He’d always said the world wasn’t what it seemed, and for the first time, I understood what he meant. The fear, the manipulation, the way truth became something you had to dig for.
Somewhere in the madness, I found
@houseinhabit.
Jessica Reed Kraus—
she wasn’t just someone covering the insanity—she understood the weight of history, the music, the voices that had spoken about times like this before. Someone who just got it, who respected the past but was living fully in the now, dissecting it, laying it bare.
a voice outside the machine,
pulling threads, piecing together a picture they didn’t want us to see.
Her words cut through the noise, laced with Dylan’s wisdom, like a signal through the static.
a reminder that this song had been playing long before we arrived.
A soundtrack to unraveling,
to waking up,
to seeing the world as it was, not as they told us it should be.
And then came the wake.
The post-pandemic hush, the world stitching itself back together
with hands still trembling from what it had just endured.
But for me, the world had already unraveled.
My uncle.
My beautiful cousin.
Names slipping into the quiet, into the spaces where grief lingers long after the headlines fade.
October 2021—my father was gone.
Not from the virus, but perhaps “the cure” itself
From the healthcare neglect and the weight of everything after.
The loneliness. The isolation. The slow erosion of a man who had already weathered too much.
And I remember the music.
Dylan’s voice, steady as the stars, unraveling time itself.
A song that never stopped being true.
A warning. A reckoning. A hymn for those still searching.
Because the world didn’t stop.
The machine kept moving.
The outrage cycle spun on, faster than ever.
The next crisis, the next battle, the next thing to fear.
The pump don’t work ‘cause the vandals took the handles.
And here we are.
Still spinning, still reeling.
Still unsure if we lived through a great awakening or just got lost in another elaborate illusion.
Still trying to cut through the static, to find something true.
The music.
The past.
The voices that never wavered.
The ones who kept looking, never settling for the surface.
And so we keep searching. For light, for truth, for something steady in a world that won’t stop spinning. And still, Dylan’s voice remains—woven through time, through memory, through the hum of history, reminding us that the song was always playing. We just finally started listening.
