Words.

They’re all we’ve got.

Words.

When the night is long, and there’s not another living soul to hang onto, you still have someone’s words.

Inevitably, anyone who wants to write gets asked who their inspiration is? “Who’s your favorite writer?”

How do you respond? The guy who wrote the first stories you fell in love with as a child (Conan Doyle)? The high school answer (Hemingway)? The college answer (Carver)? The adult answer (Hitchens)? The fake-cool answer (Kerouac)? The genre-but-acceptable answer (Gaiman)?

Or do you respond honestly, even though it’s the answer that made that one teacher at Rutgers snicker?

Bruce Springsteen is cool now. Ask The New Yorker. Or The Atlantic. Or even David Brooks.

But he wasn’t always (see: Eighties, backlash). Someday, (happily perhaps) he won’t be again. But he’ll always be the thing that makes me want to write, that idea that another person’s words can get inside someone else’s head and mean something terribly, terribly important.

Bruce has been castigated by the Left as a fair-weather progressive and by the Right as a limousine liberal. His record company and management play up his image as a blue collar hero despite his penchant for vacationing in the Italian lake country. If you don’t listen closely, there’s a lot not to like about Bruce.

But if politics and economics are ill-suited to him it’s because they don’t play to his real strength: Bruce Springsteen is the patron saint of outsiders. He is, frankly, the consummate loser. He’s the kid in the back of the class who could’ve disappeared but didn’t. He’s the teen suicide waiting to happen that somehow manages to survive.

He’s the story that otherwise doesn’t get told.

(And we love those at JDP.)

That Bruce was the first celebrity to embrace his Jersey roots, rather than run from them, is nice. But it’s really secondary. What matters is that Springsteen’s best words get closer to the truth than anything I’ve ever encountered. At his purest, he channels not working class grit, but the basic desperation of daily life. “Born to Run” is only a half-step better than “Born to Lose.” But not by much. It’s just the triumph of going on even when you don’t have any good reason in the world to do so, even when you know you’re not going to get out while you’re still young.

Without Springsteen, I don’t think I’d write. Fuck, I’m not even sure I’d get out of bed some mornings. For damn sure, I wouldn’t have this editing gig.

So sometimes you just have to write or post something to make yourself happy. Sometimes you just need to defend the things that deserve defending. Sometimes, well, you just gotta…