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.