Growing up, I never thought about college much.  It wasn’t even so much a hypothetical as it was a non-issue.  In high school, amongst my closest friends, college was a word the same way onomatopoeia was a word; if you used it you were probably using it wrong.  There were plenty of other words we tossed around instead, words like girls, and sports, and yo, that were a helluva lot more relevant to the sort of conversations were we having.  When graduation came and went college was still the last thing on my mind.  One day, the girl I was dating cornered me.  That moment, sort of the early-adult version of when growing up your mother would say, “You’re not leaving the table until you eat all of your broccoli” she more or less gave me an ultimatum; I either went inside and signed up for college or I was cut off.  She knew how to bargain; her scare tactic worked, I went inside, filled out the applications, took the required testing, and I became a college student.  It was the local community college, nothing special, but we both thought it was a something, a step in the right direction.  Not too long into my first semester her and I were no more, and college was more like a bad case of déjà vu than a step in the right direction.  There were hordes of people I’d seen since first grade in my classes; lunch tables looked like they did in tenth grade; the same faces, the same conversations.  All of it sucked; college the way I saw it was nothing but the past as a re-run, a precursor to going where I’ve already been.  With taking a couple semesters off it took me three-and-a-half years to graduate.  After I graduated all I wanted to do was get as far away from it all as I could.  I worked full-time.  When I wasn’t working, the guys I worked with and I played Mario Kart and Goldeneye on Nintendo 64.  Before long I started to notice grey hair, both on myself and on my friends.  Some were celebrating their 30^th birthdays, some were even approaching 40.  Nobody I knew seemed happy; everyone more or less just was.  One day, sitting in a room full of those friends, I started thinking about a way to get out.  Silently, I laid out scenarios.  College seemed the easiest way to go about making a change.  Besides, I never really got to experience college in the first place; what I had was nothing more than an extension of high school.  It seemed right; I thought I was owed the chance.

The thing I wondered about the most was living in a dorm.  I had plenty of preconceptions of what it might be like; I’d seen all the movies, from Animal House to Back To School to Road Trip; at community college, from the flunkies who drank themselves out of more prestigious universities, I heard the stories of debauchery, of newfound friendships, and it all seemed grand.  When I started looking into schools I was more excited about the prospect of living in a dorm than I was getting back into a classroom.  When the daydreaming became a reality, and I was sent my room assignment and the name of my roommate, I was just as scared as I was excited.  I was older than most, if not all, of the people I’d be living with and I’d never lived in the same room with anyone.  I was 21 going on 22 when I packed up my life and moved away from everything I knew into a dorm room with two twin-sized beds.  Bon Jovi and Styx were carved into the robin-egg blue brick walls; there was an iron stain on the desk/dresser.  I took the good side of the room before my roommate got there.  When he did, he pointed that fact out.  Immediately I knew I was in for some experience.

A college dorm is a lot like the way I picture Ellis Island was at the turn of the century; a bunch of people from seemingly all over converge into one space with their bare minimum of a lifetime’s worth of possessions in tow, everyone is full of hope based on their new opportunity, but the communication barrier is daunting, a Berlin Wall-like hurdle to overcome if you ever want to get anywhere.   The most common ice breaker amongst people of that age and disposition is alcohol, but since I wasn’t a drinker I had to go with the next best option; music.

In such a confined space, when one person listens to something, everyone listens to it.  You either learn to like it or you put on some headphones.  But even that only lasts for so long.  Papa Roach’s “Last Resort” and 3 Doors Down “Kryptonite” were songs you’d hear from pretty much every room on your walk to the showers.  The time of day would usually help dictate the mood; the earlier in the day it was, the more pick me up type songs you’d hear; there was a day’s worth of boring classes to suffer through, and two meals of bad food to choke down.  That later it got, the more likely you were to hear a song that might draw down the girls from the 3^rd floor in hopes that they’d shake their asses.  Somewhere during that time came an album that changed everything.  I don’t remember the first time I heard Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory, whose room I was in, what party I was at, but before long it was everywhere you went, everywhere you turned.  From pretty much every single room you walked by.  Some called it “nu-metal,” others called it “industrial rap,” or “rap-rock” but whatever it was, like the Black Death pandemic in the Middle Ages, the place and time were perfect for Hybrid Theory to flourish.  Outside of Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP and Dr. Dre’s Chronic 2000 a year earlier, in terms of popular rap you were pretty much left with Nelly, DMX, and ‘Lil Kim.  Metal was on life support with Pantera on hiatus, and Metallica, after years of dropping Loads, was off fighting Napster.  In walked Linkin Park with their hybrid of rap and metal; they weren’t exactly proficient in either, but they were balanced, and it worked.

In college the two common bonds are that everyone is broke and everyone wants to have fun.  When you’re broke, it’s easy to get angry about it; you’ve got champagne dreams on a Ramen noodles and Mad Dog 20/20 budget.  Bad beer and no money is a bonding agent, a cultural Duct tape.  But misery loves company, and when your radio is saying, “I find the answers aren’t so clear/Wish I could find a way to disappear/All these thoughts they make no sense/I found bliss in ignorance” it makes perfect sense.  In days like those, under those circumstances, nobody is looking for the next Henry David Thoreau or Bob Dylan; the last thing they want is to have to think more than what’s already required of them; they want easy, they want accessible, they want something they can relate to.  Even within that communal environment it’s easy to feel isolated; student loans only covered so much and you’ve still got three books at $75 a piece to buy.  You want to scream.  It just so happened that Chester Bennington came along and he’s pretty good at screaming.  It sounds right, comforting even.  And hell, the rhythm of a song like “Points Of Authority” is something that people with little to no sense of rhythm can dance to.

A couple weeks after 9/11 I drove with a former girlfriend from school to the Adirondacks Mountains to meet up with her friends who were attending college up there.  We were to spend a night in the mountains, and then drive up to Montreal for a night of assumed insanity.  By that time, I was a drinker, and debauchery was in order. Her friends made a mix-tape of popular music for the ride, though 90% of the CD were songs from Hybrid Theory, and the only songs any of them wanted to listen to were “Crawling,” “One Step Closer,” “In The End,” and “Papercut.”  For early October the weather was beautiful, a perfect balance between comfortable and crisp.  The leaves were still clinging to the trees and they were full of awe-inspiring color, a virtual Crayola box.  We were well on our way.  Though the car was screaming, “I’m one step closer to the edge and I’m about to break” the world could do us no wrong.  Until we tried to cross the border.

The Border Officer we pulled up to decided he wanted to try and make an example of us.  We were easy enough marks; I was the oldest of the bunch at 22, I was driving a car still technically registered to my sister whose address I couldn’t remember off the top of my head, and his tone of voice made everyone in the car nervous enough for him to get suspicious.  He pulled us aside, checked out every inch of the car, and when he didn’t find what he thought he was going to he begrudgingly let us go.  Since we were already stopped we went into the Duty Free shop, loaded up on some discounted Russian fuel, and as we pulled far enough away from earshot the girls leaned out the windows and screamed, “Shut up when I’m talking to you!”  This guy whose was just doing his job, as overzealous as he might have been, gave the car a rallying cry, someone to rebel against in a time when, with tensions still high about the still-fresh tragedy, everyone was looking for one.

That night, as we hopped in and out of the countless bars, the toasts to, “The asshole at the border in the funny hat who needs to get laid” became too numerous to remember; he was our cause, our authority figure to hate, our enabler.  After a while, all toasts, no matter who they were to, became too hard to remember; McDonald’s seemed like the best idea ever, and the steps to get there became more and more of a challenge.  When we got back to the hotel I realized that my life’s greatest void was that I never got to be a bellman, despite the fact that at the time, I worked at a hotel.  I made friends with pretty much everyone in the hotel.  “You’re such a nice American,” more than one of the other guests said, which at almost any other time would ignite the assumed response of me asking, “As opposed to the rest of us?”  But words weren’t as easy to come by as smiles and hiccups were so I just pushed the buttons they asked me to, and we ascended upward.  Sometime that night the girl I came with, the girl I was still in love with who a couple weeks before decided she didn’t want to deal with labels anymore when it regarded to us, she found me in the stairwell, covered in different currencies, fast asleep to the world.   To get me to move she suggested a kiss.  To get me back to the room she suggested more.  The next morning my head felt like a cement-mixer and we were back to being unlabeled.  I took a shower, each pass of the soap across my body dislodging another Looney or Two-ney that somehow the night before was stuck on me.  By the time I was clean I was twenty-two dollars richer and furious that I let her play me again.

That night, we made it back to Adirondacks, and she and her friends continued the party.  She tried a couple different approaches to having a conversation with me and I gave her just enough to end each one as quick as I could; I wasn’t in the mood to give into her rules of our situation.  Not then.  When it came to matters of the heart, especially the ones involving her, I could be a simmering crock pot.  So I left.  I got in my car and I drove aimlessly around the unlit roads of the Adirondack Mountains; roads I never traveled down before, but seemed to know my way around.  With the sunroof open, the air was cold, sobering.  Winter wasn’t that far off, you could feel it.  The speakers were turned up high, drowning out the silence of the otherwise lifeless world.  I knew that it would only be a matter of time before I turned the car around and drove back to her, and she knew that too, and we would go back to whatever way she wanted things to be.

“Time is a valuable thing

Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings

Watch it count down to the end of the day

The clock ticks life away

(It’s so unreal)

Didn’t look out below

Watch the time go right out the window

Tried to hold on, but didn’t even know

I wasted it all just to

(Watch you go)”

Bad poetry or not, in the end “In The End” was the perfect anthem for that moment in time.  But sometimes anthems aren’t enough; they’re just songs on the radio that for one reason or another you can’t stop listening to.  Before you know it, you’re right back where you started.  Miserable.  There’s a line in High Fidelity where Rob, the protagonist of the story asks, “Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable?  Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”  The minute I heard that line my appeal to Linkin Park made perfect sense.