[Originally published in the out-of-print “lost” debut issue of Desperation Fanzine, Summer 2020.]

In 1965, I was up in Canada and there was a friend of mine up there who had just left a rock ’n’ roll band in Winnipeg, Manitoba, near where I come from on the prairies, to become a folk singer a la Bob Dylan who was his hero at that time, and at the same time there were breaks in his life and he was going into new and exciting directions. He had just newly turned 21, and that meant in Winnipeg he was no longer allowed into his favorite hangout, which is kind of a teeny-bopper club and once you’re over 21 you couldn’t get in there anymore. So he was really feeling terrible because his girlfriends and everybody that he wanted to hang out with, his band could still go there, you know, but it’s one of the things that drove him to become a folk singer was that he couldn’t play in this club anymore. But he was over the hill. So he wrote this song that was called “oh to live on Sugar Mountain,” which was a lament for his lost youth. And I thought, God, you know, if we get to 21 and there’s nothing after that, that’s a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him and for myself just to give me some hope. It’s called “The Circle Game.” – Joni Mitchell

I keep going back to “Sugar Mountain.”

I was 16 when I first heard it, and its effect on me rivaled that of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Five-and-a-half minutes of pure bittersweetness performed live in a moment in time and ending with a guy in the crowd releasing a cough he had held in for God knows how long, because that’s what people used to do when they went out and paid to hear music. That guy is the hero of “Sugar Mountain” for not hacking up his lung in the middle of the song, and may the good grace and mercy of the universe envelop him for many lifetimes.

In solitary teenage moments I would listen to “Sugar Mountain” again and again and again and drift to sleep with its pure bittersweetness playing in my head. There in the grip of adolescence, “Sugar Mountain” made me feel old and sad for my lost youth, sad for the days of riding in the station wagon when my legs weren’t yet long enough to dangle over the seat, sad for the days of still being small enough to run and jump into my father’s arms, sad for Little League baseball and the taste of orange popsicles and getting lost to the world in a pile of autumn leaves, sad because I couldn’t be the bowl-cut kid on the front cover of Brothers and Sisters forever.

When I read in the Decade liner notes that Neil Young had written “Sugar Mountain” on his 19th birthday, I felt even older and sadder. What had I done with my life? No 16-year-old has any business thinking that, but there I was at 16 thinking just that. So I decided, despite the lack of life experience, musical training and inborn talent required to communicate a universal truth through the existential alchemy of song, that the only way I was ever going to amount to anything was to write my own “Sugar Mountain” before I hit 19, and if I failed to deliver before my self-imposed deadline, well, I may as well be dead.

And then I failed to deliver.

Nineteen came and went. So did 20 (but you can’t be 20). Then 21. Then 30. And so on. Now here I stand at the trailhead of old age and irrelevance with a dump bin of abandoned poetry in the garage and a universe of stories doing 15 to life in my head. Questions abound. Is it too late? Do I have it in me? Will anybody care? Does any of it matter?

I felt urgent at 16 and I feel urgent now. But urgent for what? Accolades? Accomplishment? An Acura? I still want to “make it,” but make what? There’s a published clip here and a minor triumph there, but there’s nothing to anthologize, nothing for my obituary, nothing the world will hold up and remember when I’m gone. “Sugar Mountain” is time slipping away in a drop-D strum, the song by which I will forever judge my creative worth and by extension my life’s worth, and here at halfway to 43, I feel creatively worthless.

Q: Why would someone of sound mind hold himself to such unsound, insane and profanely unrealistic standards?

A: Why wouldn’t he?

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