Bob Dylan didn't show up to accept his Nobel Prize in Literature because--I don't know--he's a busy man?

He didn't show up because Bob Dylan has been, is, and always will be about creating a fictionalized mystique around himself.

When Dylan was announced as the 2016 Nobel Laureate in Literature, he refused for two weeks to respond to the Swedish Academy's attempts at contacting him. His reasoning? "I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it."

A few? Apparently it took Dylan 20,160 minutes to process it--the amount in two weeks--before the synapses in his brain could wrap around the idea that a plagiarist could become a Nobel winner.

Fast forward to the award ceremony, and Dylan was a no show. In his stead, fellow folk singer Patti Smith sang Dylan's "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," and the American ambassador to Sweden read Dylan's prepared speech.

The Atlantic nearly fainted in excitement in their coverage of Dylan's speech, calling it--among many things--"subversively humble." But the real pearl from The Atlantic might be this nugget:

"It’s not that he doesn’t want to question whether his songs are literature, it’s that he hasn’t had the time."

It seems Bob Dylan is burning the candle at both ends 24/7/365, so much so that the poor man truly can't even think. Why aren't we staging an intervention to save this brave man's life from self-destruction? HE CAN'T EVEN PROCESS THOUGHT.

The Atlantic continues, writing about Patti Smith's singing at the banquet:

"She delivered an aching rendition of his song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” during which she forgot the words to the second verse and had to start again—a mistake that only heightened the lyrics’ mystery and power."

The song is so powerful, even Dylan's great friend couldn't remember the lyrics. Do you want to take a crack at singing this life-altering, classic, American song off the top of your head? Go ahead. I'll wait. [[[[[waits an hour]]]]] You don't know the powerful lyrics, do you? They might be so powerful, they make it impossible to think. Bob Dylan can alter space and time.

If you're a masochist and want to read the text to Dylan's speech, you can find it elsewhere, but not here.

Odds are in a few years we'll find out he cribbed half the speech from a Zimbabwean children's book and the musings of a politician in ancient Estonia. That's the true Bob Dylan way.