doomed slumping puddings

I just turned 50.

I feel pretty young. Except that I'm drooping more. Annoying but I am reminded of my favorite quote in all literature, from Mortals by Norman Rush:

"We are all doomed slumping puddings trying to stay hard for as long as we can."

Hilarious and sad. This is what I’ve been thinking about:

You can only write a love song at the same level of love you have lived. Not always true because you have to account for imagination, and luck. Luck and love go together hand in hand.

But mostly, you can only write about a love you have known. You can fantasize about what it might be like to have a certain kind of love, but your fantasy won’t have any natural antecedents, so the likelihood of bullshit is high. Don’t write what you don’t know.

So far I’ve mostly written autobiographically. I have written songs for girls I liked or loved or left, for my parents, my siblings, causes, history songs even. But I have never known a love like this. A love where the presence of the loved one is entirely sufficient. Where I just want to be around a person because of who they are and not actually what they can do for me. This sounds a little wild because I am married and you are supposed to feel that way toward your spouse. But the truth is, while I love her and even like her (those things are different as you know) and while she is my life partner without whom I truly could not live, on some level I love her because of what she does for me. My wife feels the same. It’s why they call it being partners. Mutual give and take.

But Zuzu is different. She can only take. She can do nothing for me except be near. She has only herself to offer: her giggly laugh, the soft curls in her hair, her cuddle as she falls asleep.

For anyone who has had the honor of being a parent - of being entrusted with the raising of a unique human individual, with her own personality and her own face and her own little body - I am telling you, you have never known love as deep as it can be.

I had the privilege of taking care of Zuzu last week. Feeding her, changing her diaper, putting her down for a nap, and to bed. Sometimes she was willing and delighted and sometimes she shouted no! in my face with this new glottal thing she’s developed which is just incredibly irritating. But I loved all of it. I thought there’s nothing I’d rather be doing. Not working or writing songs or touring or really, anything that involves being away from her. It’s all going by so fast and I want to be here for as much as possible.

I was sitting on a couch in a hotel room looking absentmindedly out the window which is a specialty of mine and the windows were open and it smelled like the ocean because we were in that part of California. Zuzu was playing with something called a busybook and I looked down at her and saw the whole thing, the parade of childhood innocence on full display right there in front of me. I was seized with that feeling - that there was nothing I would rather do than be right there in that moment with this person. And the song just appeared. It was a truly weird thing. I didn’t even have to write it down.

I am 50 today and I have lived hard and fast and fun and I have taken many chances and made good on a few of them and but for maybe two people I am the most well read person I know which doesn’t really count for much unless you’re in it for the poems. And that is what I am in it for.

The poetry never ends, it just changes and changes and changes.

If you are in Nashville this weekend I am premiering my new bluegrass band The Medium Heroes, at the Shelby Block Party out in front of Roy’s Meat Service in East Nashville. All original songs, by me and my accomplices. We hit at 5p.