In the meantime, I would like to post something sappy & gross. If you care about your teeth, read no further. If you decide to continue on, I will not be held responsible for any cavities that may result from the saccharine nonsense I'm about to write. This is a love letter.
Tomorrow I am going to see one of my favorite bands EVER. I'm going alone which is because when I bought the tickets, I had just moved to Austin and had no friends. In retrospect, I am sort of glad I am going alone. This is a band I have loved since I was in high school. I have followed them across state lines, I have waited outside venues to meet them, I have waited at Tower Records at midnight the night of their album release just to be the first one to hear it, I have gushed over my love of them while on various stimulants and then cursed myself in the morning for telling strangers about my obsession.
Then I grew up. Over the past few years, I have left friends and moved cities, started jobs and quit them, made new friends only to leave them and start anew again. But this band has always come with me. I may not have been to one of their shows in years, I wouldn't be caught dead waiting outside a venue for them, I bought their last album a few weeks after it came out cause I forgot about it and don't really put myself in precarious situations with strangers anymore - but I still love them.
Hopefully, if you are lucky, you have something that means this much to you. Whether it is a band or a book or just a really good fucking sweater, hopefully you love something enough that at one time you would have driven to New Jersey just to experience
I have a sinking suspicion that tomorrow will be the last time I see them. From what I'm heard whispered around the proverbial water cooler, they may not last long enough to make another album. And, like most relationships do, this one has probably run its course. They have given me the soundtrack to nearly 10 years of my life, I have given them a few bucks in ticket revenue.
For me, this isn't just about loving a band, it's about loving a time in your life when you loved that band. It's about packing up a Mazda Protege with you best pals and chain smoking Camels and giving the middle finger to your middle class suburban high school experience and going to the 9:30 club in your school uniform and scrubbing the stamps off your hands so your parents wouldn't know where you had been all night. It's about all the stuff that comes along with listening to a song and knowing it was written for you. It's about being 18 and truly believing that you wanted to stay 18 forever. It's about being 25 and being a little more jaded and realizing that being 18 wasn't all it was cracked up to be but wishing you still cared about music or art or almost anything as much you did back then.
