A reader said that my "bleak outlook" is "partly age-related."

I said, "You should have seen me when I was 17."

That's when I met the young man who later became my college roommate.

My roommate was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature.

For weeks, however, he did not acknowledge the award.

One of the Nobel committee members, Per Wastberg, said that makes him "impolite and arrogant."

Hey, Wastberg: Know your recipient well, before you start Nobeling him.

We met when I was in high school, in southwestern Ohio.

He traveled with me to California. I took classes during the day. He wrote the songs that I listened to all night.

We spent some time together in Arizona, before we moved to Colorado in 1977.

I have heard him hundreds of times unexpectedly on the radio, and probably thousands of times intentionally, going across everything that has happened to me since I was 17.

Reactions to the award have been all over the place. I am not surprised.

He is a scruffy-looking man, with a nasal-twang voice, and there was a time when what he wrote about seemed to bother a few people.

He was called a protest singer. He said that Steve Lawrence and Edie Gorme were protest singers, not him.

The humor in that wasn't lost on a kid who was becoming skeptical and suspicious of a lot of things, and a lot of people. That hasn't changed.

Irvine Welsh, the author of "Trainspotting," heard about the award, and said, "An ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies."

I'd come home from school at night, and get out "Desolation Row." Put it on the turntable, and put out the lights.

Eleven minutes or so later I'd wake and hear the sound of the needle lifting and returning to its cradle.

The room would be as quiet as a room can be, and my thoughts were on what I had just heard, and where my life was headed.

I still quote him all the time, in my columns and books, to myself, to Jennifer, to the dog.

Almost word for word, I could hand you "My Back Pages" and "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again."

"Don't think Twice, It's Alright," same thing.

Oh, we parted ways for a while, after his motorcycle accident. That didn't last long.

My friend hasn't refused the award - he announced late last week that he will accept it. It simply took him a while to say thanks. He said he will attend the Dec. 10 Nobel ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, "if at all possible."

Jean-Paul Sartre refused the award altogether, in 1959, saying he did not want to be "institutionalized." Sartre once said, "Hell is other people." He wasn't exactly Mr. Green Jeans, and neither is my friend.

He ended a concert that came after the award was announced with Frank Sinatra's "Why Try to Change Me Now?"

"I'll go away weekends, leave the keys in the door, but why try to change me now?"

Perfect.

Bob Dylan's effect on me has been deeply meaningful and enduring. His words, their cadence, clarity and ambiguity have always made me think. Twice.

"I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade, into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it."

Craig Marshall Smith is an artist, educator and Highlands Ranch resident. He can be reached at craigmarshallsmith@comcast.net.