Well. Here we are again.

It’s been damned near a year since I last posted here. About two months ago, a good fellow named Will sent me an e-mail that said he’d stumbled on the site and “just wanted to say ‘Hallelujah!’” That made me feel good, but it wasn’t enough to get me going again.

But over the last week or so, I heard two songs, and I wanted once again to start writing to the few, we happy few. The first song came last Saturday night at a concert in lovely (and I say that with every bit of sarcasm I can muster) Duluth, Georgia. The bill: Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello and Amos Lee. For the very last tune, Mr. Zimmerman pulled out “Masters of War.” For those of you who have never heard -- or really listened -- to the tune, here are the lyrics.

It just struck me, while listening to Bob croak out this song, written about the masters of another war 30 years ago, how timely it still was. It made me think that maybe we ought to be sending that link to those lyrics to all our friends. Because the people behind this current war have proven, even more so since I last wrote (something I would have thought unimaginable a year ago), that they are, as Bob wrote three decades ago, “ain’t worth the blood that runs in your veins.”

The second song arrived on Tuesday, when Steve Earle’s new album, “Washington Square Serenade,” came out. After I got my ass out of Appalachia as a teenager, I’ve spent my whole adult life living in big cities -- and for seven years, the big city was the biggest: New York. Mr. Earle has moved there now, and he lives in the same neighborhood where I used to live. The album is about, at least in part, how NYC has affected Steve’s soul. Living there sure affected mine. And I got this “you’ve come full circle” feeling while listening to the record, because I distinctly remember the first time I ever heard a Steve Earle song. It was “Someday,” from the “Guitar Town” album, released back in 1986. I was living in New York City then (for the first time), and I’ll never forget listening to the first line of that song: “There ain’t a lot that you can do in this town/You ride down to the lake and then you turn back around.”

It was as perfect a description as I’d ever heard of my youth in a small Southern town. There I was, 25 years old, living in New York City, listening to a guy in Nashville describe my childhood in Georgia. And now, here I am, 46 years old, living in Georgia again, listening to the same dude describe the same sense of wonder that I felt upon moving to New York City back then. He juxtaposes the wonder of living in that town with the terror of living in the modern world best in the second song on the album, “Down Here Below.” And he does it by writing from the perspective of Pale Male, the famous red-talked hawk that lords over Central Park. Check out these words:

“Pale Male the famous redtail hawk performs wingstands high above midtown Manhattan,

“Circles around for one last pass over the park,

“Got his eye on a fat squirrel down there and a couple of pigeons,

“They got no place to run they got no place to hide,

“But Pale Male he’s cool, see, because his breakfast ain’t goin’ nowhere,

“So he does a loop-t-loop for the tourists and the six o’clock news,

“Got him a penthouse view from the tip-top of the food chain, boys,

“He looks up and down on Fifth Avenue and says, ‘God, I love this town,’

“But life life goes on down here below,

“And all us mortals struggle so,

“We laugh and cry and live and die,

“That’s how it goes,

“For all we know,

“Down here below.”

Indeed, in today’s world, all us mortals struggle so.

We read the papers, and we see the masters of war from the old song who, “like Judas of old ... lie and deceive.” But the beauty of this world redeems us. As the new song reminds us, it’s possible to “struggle so,” every day, and still look around and say, “God, I love this world.”

Keep pushing, y’all.