If A.J. Weberman has any regrets about the year he spent in jail, he hides them well. In fact, he wears his prison record like a badge of honour: as a first-generation hippie and long-time political activist, he's honour-bound to flout the laws of society. And as a connoisseur of irony, he no doubt sees the circumstances of his arrest as delicious beyond all imagining.

Weberman, you see, is the inventor of garbology, the art of psychoanalyzing public figures based on what can be found in their trash. But six years ago, the garbologist got garbologized: FBI agents watched the New York City resident toss a suspicious package in his neighbourhood Dumpster, and when they investigated they found materials that had been used to ship a significant amount of industrial-strength marijuana.

"I kind of knew something was up," the raspy-voiced author and conspiracy theorist confides, on the line from his Manhattan home. "I got the vibes when I was walking down from my office and putting the wrappers in the garbage can on the corner. I felt like someone was watching me, but I attributed it to having smoked this Canadian pot. It was real strong, man; it was supposedly grown in trailers that were buried underground, and then they had the lights and the water and everything-a real underground operation."

He laughs. Maybe it's the coffee he's drinking or the joint he extinguished only minutes before taking my call, but Weberman's feeling good. Then again, perhaps this former Georgia Straight contributor is just thinking about the outcome of his time in stir: his just-published Dylan to English Dictionary (Yippie Museum Press; US$32.99), a fascinating if utterly eccentric attempt to decode the writings of the world's greatest living songwriter. (Who, it should be noted, was the first subject-or victim-of Weberman's garbological research.)

Dylan obsessives will find much to admire, and perhaps even more to argue about, in the 536-page tome, which features at least as many off-the-wall opinions as it does penetrating insights. Weberman is probably right, for instance, to insist that the tunes Dylan wrote during his born-again-Christian period are covert expressions of Jewish self-loathing-a phenomenon well known to Freudians worldwide, not to mention Woody Allen. Elsewhere, though, his insights are less trustworthy. Rather than conduct an objective literary analysis of his idol's lyrics, he's combed through hundreds of songs to find justification for a pair of controversial theses: that Dylan was, for much of his career, addicted to opiates, and to heroin in particular; and that he contracted AIDS, probably through unprotected sex, during the late 1980s.

"Of course, I could take anything out of context and make it seem like it's about something," says Weberman, who allows that Dylan appears to have beaten his supposed drug problem. "But if you look at all the CDs that he's done since World Gone Wrong you'll see that a similar theme can be extrapolated-and that there's something very wrong as far as Dylan's health goes."

It is well documented that Dylan suffered a dangerous brush with histoplasmosis-a fungal chest infection particularly prevalent among AIDS patients-in 1997, and Weberman claims to have had his diagnosis confirmed by one of his subject's close friends. But he won't reveal his source, and without hard evidence there's no saying whether his theories are true.

Not surprisingly, the famously reclusive artist has yet to comment on the Dictionary or its author's claims. Dylan wasn't always so reticent, however: he once attacked Weberman on a Bowery sidewalk, following an incident in which the singer's self-appointed Boswell disclosed the great man's address to a crowd of gawking acolytes.

The two could be described as having a true love-hate relationship. As a revolutionary activist, Weberman remains disappointed that Dylan chose not to lead the '60s counterculture into battle. Albums like Self Portrait and Nashville Skyline, he argues, "were designed not to offend the establishment so that he could shoot heroin in peace, basically, which was his major goal in life".

Meanwhile, Weberman's man in Dylan's camp has apparently reported that the singer has come to a grudging appreciation of his would-be amanuensis. "Dylan told him, 'I don't hate Weberman. He did a lot of bad things, like bring people around my house and go through my garbage and stuff, but he also sold a lot of pot, and I think everybody should get stoned.'

"At the same time," Weberman notes, "I don't think Dylan particularly likes me, because I'm revealing his innermost thoughts, and also revealing the fact that he's HIV-positive. But he puts all that in his poetry for me to find.

"I could never have invented this on my own," he adds. "I'm just not that creative a person, but Dylan's an amazing guy. He's a totally unbelievable genius, beyond people's comprehension."

That, at least, is one conclusion the singer's admirers won't want to dispute.