Dissatisfaction, the great teacher and muse of fire | MARK HUGHES COBB

It wasn't until I grew up that I realized teachers were people. Sometimes smart. Often well-read, learned (the Shakespearean learn-ED adjective, not the verb) humans. Motivators and leaders, role models and inspirations.

Three revelations: 1) They're people. 2) They may not be old. In Tuscaloosa Academy days, many were less than a decade ahead. A couple were fresh out of college, so yes, as 18-year-olds, we crushed on 23-year-olds, which lessens the weirdness a sliver. Also 3) You may be teaching, want it or not.

Insight glows as years on Earth surpass those of folks who lead cities, when your dander surges at questions of whether X is too old for Y, because X = Z, Z being near enough your age to fall within the margin of terror.

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Another peril: Finding the learned may be your pals. At some point, they become kids.

Around the holidays, I got a message about a kid I knew, from the earlier century. Smart and talented, but in the University of Alabama's Department of Theatre and Dance, that's practically a given. Grace was rolling in to visit Alabama family, and looking to set up a late-December gig. She'd returned to playing music.

Ruh-roh, oy vey, and yikes.

A mutual pal and I saw her posts, and thought the same: Let X = a healthy age, and Y = back to playing in a band, then X plus Y = divorced.

We set up a gig at Loosa Brews, and invited as guitar-singer guest Evy Alley, the prodigy born to dancer-actor-singer-choreographer-director Stacy Alley, a grad student when Grace was undergrad, and Rob Alley, jazz man extraordinaire, educator and advocate of life as improv.

As we learn from reunions, some age better. Change layers around the core, and just ask Yeats, alterations can be for the best. Grace looks much the same, lean and lovely, but I'd no idea what a fine writer-singer-musician she'd become, though my Damn Dirty Apes played UA's Guerrilla Theatre roughly 2002-2009, and invited kids to guest-sing. Live rock-karaoke. I don't think we got her on the mic, and that's a shame, as we share a love for wordy, pugnacious writers. At Loosa, I backed her up on originals -- Her seven-song EP "Wisteria" is at www.graceyukichmusic.bandcamp.com -- and covers from Decemberists to Iris DeMent to Loretta Lynn and beyond.

My set began with originals, "Sidekick," "Lie Lie Lie," "There But for the Wrath of God Go I," "Six Impossible Things," "Heaven (Up in the Air Over You)," "Run to Me," "Grief and Tequila," "Vicious Circus" and "Hot Now," with covers of Will Kimbrough's "Goodnight Moon," Jeff Barry and Andy Kim's "Sugar Sugar," the Rascals' "How Can I Be Sure," and Bruce's "Open All Night/Mister State Trooper." In case the show ran short, I'd prepped Decemberists, Joan Jett, Jason Isbell, David Gates, Brandi Carlile, Jimmy Webb, and TV tunes ("All You Get" from "Ted Lasso," "Christmas Time is Here" from "A Charlie Brown Christmas," and "Forever Now" from "This is Us").

You should see me pack for a three-day weekend. "Of course there's more," says Robbie on 'Dinosaurs," learning about prepping for the future. "That's what more MEANS."

Evy led through Brandi, Joni and Beatles, then Grace took over. I recalled her as this sweet kid ― more Evy than me ― but she's a professor of sociology at Quinnipiac University who's written books, lectured at Princeton, and been called on and quoted by major media. She's a mom, co-raising a daughter with her ex, peacefully, traveling for 'Bama Christmas together.

Everyone I know who "left music" returned via divorce, inspired by an plenitude of raw material.

As life simultaneously constricts and shatters, the bangin' cosmology of heartache, you may find yourself accepting invitations ignored before; you may find yourself hoisting a passed-around guitar; you may find yourself semi-miraculously harmonizing with a star; you may find yourself sharing stages, now and forever more.

Same as it ever was.

I looked this up: Misery is not actually a requirement to play music.

Also, you do not have to be aged — agED, again with the Shakespearean: distinguished, less despairing than "old" — to have things to say. Most of my closest pals are creatives, so also teachers, as art feeds the soul, not the palate.

Sometimes I get asked to speak, on literature, journalism, music, theater or whatnot, at high schools, colleges and such, the occasional club, workshop or seminar, yet I do not have the foggiest idea what to say. Ask anyone who tuned into my OLLI talk last October, titled "From Willie Nelson to the Rude Mechanicals to the Medicis." Those dots remain jaggedly disconnected.

But man, I could nail an impromptu 50-minute chat about imposter syndrome.

My pal Lisa lent perspective years ago, when I'd stopped by Shelton State to drop off Christmas donations. I'd scraped rock bottom pondering: After 30 years at the same gig, what can I do? She underlined: Play, write and sing music; act, direct, and compose for theater. I've performed improv murder-mystery, written short plays performed at UA, Shelton and the Kentuck Festival of the Arts. I co-wrote, with Raphe Crystal, the musical "Cakewalk," workshopped at UA. I've created or co-created the Rude Mechanicals, a metric ton of bands, and community events. Won awards; gotten paid.

Still, here's why I ask "Who, me?": Albert Camus.

So long ago the kids must now be grown, probably professors with kids, I spoke to a class around a stack of books I'd brought; the impetus for the invite was probably my old Sunday review column, Paperback Reader.

I talked up "The Great Gatsby," John Irving's "Setting Free the Bears" and "The Water-Method Man," and a handful I'd loved since forever, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," Poe's "Tales of Mystery & Imagination," Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine," and Howard Pyle's Arthurian series, next to T.H. White's "The Once and Future King." To anchor the desk, Iain Pears' "An Instance of the Fingerpost," and Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum."

Rambling done, I fielded questions, most innocuous, semi-interested. Fine by me, as again, I wasn't sure what I was doing. Then one young woman, obviously smart and engaged, asked about Albert Camus.

I did not lie to that kid, who in memory leans goth, Ally Sheedy of this "Breakfast Club." In a blink, I saw myself: the outsider, the stranger who moves more easily within books and ideas than social circuses.

Instead of seeing her, noting her, offering a hand up, asking her to tell ME about Camus, I ... uh ... cracked a stupid joke. Embarrassed. Caught out. Imposter. As Twain wrote of Tom's attempt to sell a mortified toe as reason to skip school, "Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene."

Why do long-ago idiocies ache? Why am I agonizing over how I failed to properly learn "Since You've Been Gone," circa 2006, for sweet Stephanie Marie Mosley, though she did sing the hell out of it, even as the guitarist flubbed, on the Bama Theatre stage? Why, just this morning, was I re-blocking the pivotal "Kill Claudio" scene from last summer's "Much Ado"? Why, after 30-plus years as a pro, do I feel like over-the-hill Roy Hobbs waggling a lightning splinter of a bat, cramped by an unhealing wound, every time I sit to write? The greatest that never was.

Why can't I think of lost loved ones without knowing I could have helped, should have gotten them up and about, pushed them toward the help they needed? Failure.

The answer howls along with Paul Westerberg's "Unsatisfied": "Everything you dream of/is right in front of you/and everything is a lie." Or perhaps modulated by "Once in My Life," not to be confused with "Once in a Lifetime," as paraphrased above. Colin Meloy co-wrote it with Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo, and like "Unsatisfied," its repetitions smite like hammers:

"Oh, for once in my/Oh, for once in my life./Could just something go/Could just something go right?"

After all, as no one probably said, "If you won't feel sorry for yourself, who will?"

If you're satisfied, you're probably wrong.

Reach Tusk Editor Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com, or call 205-722-0201.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Dissatisfaction, the great teacher and muse of fire | MARK HUGHES COBB