On Jimmy Eat World And Those Nights In My Car

            Last night I went back in time.

            Not literally, of course.  Last I checked I don’t have access to a DeLorean and my Flux Capacitor is still not finished.  But in a figurative sense I absolutely went back in time last night.

            Get this ya’ll.  I was driving home from seeing a friend of mine in Tallapoosa and had just got off the interstate.  I’d been playing the guessing game with the radio in the half-hour it took me to get home when a voice from the past reached out to me.  It was those same familiar chords and the quick, barely audible voice of Jim Adkins of Jimmy Eat World that came to take me back to the days of old.

            Ya’ll I was a total loser in high school.  You remember that kid who wanted to wear band t’s because he thought that listening to Motion City Soundtrack made him cool?  That was me.  I was seriously addicted to some mid-shelf pop-punk/emo/indie rock (if you don’t get the slash line you never used Purevolume).  And here I was now suddenly taken back to those times.  These days I consider my musical taste a bit more mature and intellectual (read: douchey and pretentious) and I fancy myself to be above the regular pitfalls that affect most lonely adolescents.  But here I was confronted with the memory of my past as it blared through my speakers and I knew in that one instance there was only one thing for me to do.

            I rocked out.  Hard.

            Ya’ll my car was swerving every which way all over West Stewart Mill Road.  And I didn’t care.  It was fun.  What ever happened to fun rock music?

            Nostalgia can be dangerous.  I know.  Every year on November 6^th I’ll call or text my friend Ryan to remind him that it’s the anniversary of the day my senior year that we lost our state cross country meet.  For whatever reason I hold on to some silly, barely meaningful race from high school and hold it up as a massive world event that must have had far reaching ramifications.

            But it can be fun also.  I got home that night and thanks to the magic of Spotify I was able to go back and listen to my own holy triumvirate of late 90’s and early 2000’s pop-punk/emo/indie rock.  You may know them as Jimmy Eat World, Saves the Day, and The Get Up Kids but to me they were so much more.

            So here I am back in Douglasville not even a week and already I’m rocking out to Jimmy Eat World on those nights in my car…aw hell, I just hope that maybe since the past is all coming back I’ll sprout a couple of hairs on top of my head too.

Dear Mr. Wolfe, I Have Come Home Again.

            So I said I was going to start updating the blog more and I went out and took a month hiatus.  Even more disturbing is that nobody seemed to notice.  Oh well.

            So what have I been up to the last month?  If you don’t know then you aren’t up to date!  I moved back to Georgia (yay) and now I’m living with my parents again (boo).  I turned twenty-five which makes the whole living with mom and dad thing about three hundred times worse, but it is shelter and they are good parents so I don’t suppose I have too much room to complain.

            Florence was a great place for the last three years.  For the first time in my life I was able to live in a place where I felt like I actually belonged.  Until of course I didn’t anymore.

            The times change and people change with them and our “homes” can change in the process.  I started feeling that Alabama was wearing thin on me and I’m sure there were plenty of people in The Shoals who were ready to see my leave.  So we had our drinks, told our (mostly dirty) jokes, and said our goodbyes. 

            Thomas Wolfe wrote this really amazing novel that was published after he died called “You Can’t Go Home Again.”  I’d have to say I agree with him.  Home changes and the people who were there change.  When I left Douglasville, Georgia in August of 2008 I was dating a girl I was about 30% sure I was going to marry (that’s a lot for me) and moving to a town in north-west Alabama that I had never been to in my life.  Suffice it to say I’m different.

            I’ve grown.  And I do mean physically.  If you knew me in those days I was still relatively thin.  These days with my super distorted self image I view myself as the size of a house.  And all my hair is falling out so there is no doubt that I have aged something opposite of gracefully.

            But I have grown spiritually, emotionally, and mentally as well.  The things that once bothered me don’t anymore and the things I once enjoyed spending money on seem frivolous these days.  I still have to ask myself the same questions every day and I do get largely the same answers but now my reasoning behind why I feel the way I do is so much deeper.  And I have so many great friends to thank for all of that.

            So here I am.  Back at “home,” whatever that is.  My parents are older and not used to have people in the house.  I’m older and not used to having to live with other people.  The neighborhood has changed.  People have come and gone and even those that stay aren’t the same people they were back in the summer of 2008.  A POS economy will have that effect.  So really I haven’t come back home at all.  The world is different and the people I love and care about are different.  Some of them are dead.  Some of the ones I used to love are out of my life.  And some of the people I love now weren’t in it back then.  So I look forward to this next chapter in life and I don’t see it as a step backwards or laterally but rather as one moving forward.  Because places and people change and life moves on.  The sun rises and sets and our world spins and babies are born and people die.  The only constants are death.  And taxes.  And me rambling.