june 18, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

I found my first gray hair yesterday. They’ve been in my beard for years, but this is the first one to grow out of my head. And it’s all Bruce Springsteen’s fault. 

After sustained and enthusiastic recommendation by one of my good friends, I finally tried out the ’78 album Darkness at the Edge of Town, and now I’m on kind of a kick. I’m getting older, and the first time I heard “Badlands,” its straightforward sentimentality kept me interested enough to keep listening, whereas in the past I would have found the intimacy of it foreboding and unsettling and turned it off in pursuit of something “cooler.” 

“talk about a dream, try to make it real / you wake up in the night with a fear so real”

Then, “Adam Raised a Cain” came on and I thought, “damn, this does kind of kick ass.” Bruce is easily the coolest boomer. Not that it’s the stiffest competition. 

(Call me ageist all you want. You guys inherited the most robust economy in this country’s history, stripped it to the bone, and called us snowflakes for complaining about inheriting a carcass. Whatever. Back to regularly scheduled programming.)

I’m not going to go track by track with my analysis of a record that everyone and their mother has probably heard at some point in their life. Even writing this feels like it would if you went your whole life never eating ice cream, had your first bite at twenty-five, and then walked down the street extolling the virtues of vanilla to everyone you see. It’s like, yeah dude, obviously. Me being late to the party isn’t that interesting to read. But, one song in particular warrants further conversation, my favorite on the album: “Racing in the Street.” 

It’s a piano ballad, which makes the fact that it’s my favorite song on the album very funny to me. My music taste is such a shifting kaleidoscope lately, owed mostly to my eccentric songwriter friends. My poor girlfriend suffers Warren Zevon, Townes Van Zandt, Connie Converse, Springsteen, Kyuss, Magnolia Electric Company, and lots of assorted dad rock lately. It’s part of a larger effort on my part to simplify, get out of my Elliott Smith rut, and find new (old) stuff to obsess over. My first record wasn’t the greatest, but I think it’s not bad. At the same time, I think trying to write toward more complexity isn’t the right direction for me. Plus, it wouldn’t be the worst thing to have a couple cowboy chord songs in my live set to give my hands a break. Travis picking takes its toll.

​But back to Bruce. The line that grays my hair these days is:

“now some guys they just give up living / and start dying little by little, piece by piece / some guys come home from work and wash up / and go racin’ in the street”

I’ve always had an Energizer bunny in me. I don’t typically go home after work. It’s usually jiu jitsu, an open mic, hanging with Maddy, or haunting some barstool alone if I have no other plans, scrawling half-baked lyric ideas in a journal or reading, glancing around occasionally to see if anything interesting is happening. But “Racing in the Street” has been propelling this to new heights. Every time an opportunity to go out surfaces, I think that I don’t want to be the type of guy that dies little by little, piece by piece, who goes home after work and trades the Bad Screen for the Good Screen and just rots away into a complacent and boring, slowly fattening husk of who he used to be. Last night was the first night in over a week that I got home before ten, and it was purely due to exhaustion, which manifests for me in a general elevated dickishness, a flat negativity and lack of desire to do anything, and a general unproductive attitude. 

​But, I also found that damn gray hair. 

​So, most likely due to some subconscious belief that it would make me feel young, I drank a few beers and played a twenty-year-old video game until I fell asleep on the couch (I’m recreating Randy Johnson’s career in MLB 07 the Show, in case you were wondering what form my arrested development takes these days. He’s 11-0 so far in his second season and his fastball regularly hits 102. No big deal). Then, I woke up, and my headache, bloat, nausea, and chest pain reminded me that I’m getting older, and maybe there are better ways to feel young, to race in the street, than to just casually drink. 

I’ve already lived long enough to see this track I’m on warp into a collision course. You look at some people’s lives, especially ones that end badly and early, but also the ones that slowly wither into wrinkled dependence, and it’s easy to ascribe some sort of inevitability to it. “Oh, he died the way he lived, fast. We all should have seen this coming.” I’m not there yet, but I can look ahead and see traffic slowing down, and I’m thinking I should ease on the brakes so I don’t have to slam on them to avoid a crash. Because if you’re not careful the crash is always there, and even though you should enjoy the view, you still need to watch for it. 

​My gray hair isn’t Bruce’s fault, either. I don’t know about you, but I notice more and more that the explanations I give for the things I do almost always come retroactively, especially for decisions that are mostly harmless, but suboptimal, and unsustainable. At some point, not holding yourself personally accountable gets boring at best, bleak at worst. Bruce himself said it: 

“daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain / now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame”

Sometimes, I don’t want to go home because I’m uncomfortable sitting alone in myself. And I shouldn’t use a lyric Bruce Springsteen wrote forty-six years ago to make excuses for that. Not every decision is noble—if it were, nobility would be meaningless. 

For the record, I made it to work today and I’ll still exercise and make money and spend time with people I love later, so last night’s decisions have not lost me today. I’ll just feel like shit physically the entire time I do it, and that’s no way to live long-term, even without considering concerns about long term health. 

I’m not at the point yet when I’ll fully admit the party’s over, but I’m getting there. But maybe that’s the wrong way to put it. Maybe the party won’t end—its texture will just change. The nights won’t always need to end in a haze, and fun won’t always need to come at the expense of quality sleep. Intoxication comes in many healthier forms. And the guy who sips bourbon alone on a barstool never looks young anyway. Reckless abandon doesn’t equal youth. Maybe all the ways I try to stay young are the things aging me. The habits of a more weather-worn and lonelier person, the kind of guy I used to think I was and am trying to leave behind, now with my robust circle of friends and solid happy relationship and the steady job and new music on the way. It’s hard to step out into something new when you don’t know what it is.

But it beats standing still. And rest assured:

“tonight, tonight the highway’s bright / out of our way mister you best keep / cause summer’s here and the time is right / for racin’ in the street”