Ah the blues
The ball and chain that is ’round every English musician’s leg
In fact every musician’s leg
Tryin’ to kick it off baby?
No no.
You’ll just never do it
And these are the blues of time
And the blues of a woman
And a man thinkin’ of her
As time goes by…
Fast-forward to this autumn, when the blues plays backdrop to a certain Fall by a certain someone you’ve seen here for a certain two-decades-plus, and you have a preview of what the next season is going to bring. A soothsayer sometimes is just an educated guesser. Or the master of their own destiny. Right now I am not feeling very much like either, so I slow things down to remind myself it’s still summer, that there are still sunny days to come – though maybe not this week – and I have a little less than a month left of my fiftieth year on earth. A song, then, for my deceased youth – a song to my former self – a song for the ages:
There is nothin’ I can do
If you leave me here to cry
There is nothin’ I can do
If you leave me here to cry
You know my love will follow you baby
Mmm until the day I die
Some days you feel all of your fifty years – you creak and crack as you slowly push against gravity, awkwardly raising yourself into an upright position then stumbling into the dark of early morning. It’s a wakening that has taken place every day for fifty years – not always in the same room, or the same time, or the same city – but at least once a day for all this time I have risen and done this same routine of getting up. Seems like such a simple thing, but oh how much it sometimes takes to face the day, and how much so many will never know…
I’ve given you all I own;
That is one thing you cannot deny
Oh I’ve given you all I own;
Baby that is one thing you cannot deny
And my love will follow you baby
Yeah
Till the day this man dies.
Feeling all these fifty years, I stand before the mirror of the camera’s gaze in underwear and morning grogginess, having reached the point where such revelatory actions no longer thrill or scare me; chalk that up to this very blog, which has taught me to be nakedly myself in a twenty-three-year trajectory to reach an emotional couch of comfort and genuine confidence. Realizing one’s worth takes time – in my case at least fifty years, and counting, because I am far from done. I am also tired – some of the fuel gone now that I know there is nothing left to prove – and weary from the toll it takes to realize this, to live it, and to get up another day. Happily, it happens mostly on autopilot these mornings, and the muscle memory of rising still sees me through this essential task – most of the time I don’t even think about it.
I’ve got failure all around me
No matter how hard I try.
I’ve got failure
It’s all around me
No matter how hard I
Try try
You know my ghost will haunt you baby
Until the day you stop down and die
Well you better get up
Right now right now
The music sounds like fall, and I know it’s coming, and still I sing these words to my younger self, my former selves, a battle between me and the other versions of me that came before – that quintessential battle with the self that never ends without Pyrrhic retribution. To conquer yourself is to conquer yourself. One can’t help that certain parts of former selves be vanquished, exiled – and you will miss those parts of yourself, even if you knew they couldn’t and shouldn’t last.
Well
You think that you have left me behind
And that with your other man you’re safe
And you’re away from me baby but uh
One o’ these days you’re gonna break down and cry
Because there is no escape from this man
Because this man’s love is so strong
He’s gonna haunt you
You know my love will follow you
Mmm until the day I die
Yet as much as you will try leave your past behind, by my age you realize that it can’t really be done. With each realization and determination of leaving something behind, you understand that you have brought it with you by acknowledging it. You are who you are because of all the things that happened to you in the past, and to lose any of that is to sunder the person you’ve become. The soul wasn’t made to take that kind of cleaving. And so we dance – me and all my former selves – me and all the past – a dance to the death, because death isn’t anything more than a celebration of a life made whole, made complete by its imminent arrival; death is confirmation that you were here, that once you lived. I write this to render it less frightening, as I’m closer to dying than to being born, and I sing this song to myself as a reminder to stop trying to get away from who I once was. Learning to forgive myself is something I couldn’t do back then – it’s something I have to work on now.
There is just one thing I want to tell you before I go
I’m gonna leave it
I’m gonna leave it
Leave it up to you
So long, baby, bye-bye
Hey I’m gonna leave it up to you baby
So long, baby ,bye-bye
Well you know my love will follow you
Mmm ’til the day I die
