I’ll never be confused for a prophet; if I could tell the future there wouldn’t have been any heartache, any bad decisions, I wouldn’t have invested in Beanie Babies.  But on more than one occasion in my life I’ve had these overwhelming feelings—a sixth sense, intuition, or whatever you call it—where I knew what was going to happen.  At 18, while sitting at work, I had an urge to play the numbers 349 in the Daily Numbers lottery.  I’d never played Pick 3 before, or gambled in any form really, but the urge was so strong I went with it, I spent fifty cents and I ended up winning $120.  A month later I had the same sort of feeling, only it was to play New York Yankees uniform numbers as NY Lotto numbers.  This time I didn’t give in to the urge.  Two weeks later, on the front page of the local paper, there was an article about a man who won the lottery playing New York Yankees jersey numbers the same night I had my urge.  When I was 20 I spent a week in Bangor, Maine trying to find myself.  I never did, find myself that is, but for that week, every turn I made I knew what was going to be around the corner, what the buildings were going to look like; I really felt like I’d been there before.  Maybe part of it, maybe all of it was coincidence: I’d seen the numbers 349 earlier that day on a price tag or something, or I had just watched a Yankees game, or I’d read so much Stephen King that the streets I was traveling were the same ones he often wrote about.  I don’t know.

A few weeks into the fall semester I was lost.  The girl I’d spent the summer counting away the calendar to see, after that first party her and I stopped talking.  I had five literature classes with a total of 84 novels to read, and one Fiction Workshop which I had no idea how to approach because creatively I hadn’t written anything longer than four or five stanzas since I was 15.  I had two jobs; I worked around 40 hours a week.  When I was home, I’d lie in my bed and stare at the ceiling, too worn down to focus on reading, too uninspired to write.  Sleep was scarce, and I started having nightmares.  One night I woke up drenched in sweat.  I was having this dream where I was tightrope walking between two skyscrapers; the cable was covered in grease and the sneakers I was wearing had no tread left on them.  Hundreds of feet beneath me were all of my friends from college and some other people from my past.  I could see all of their faces, their expressions.  They were whispering things to each other that I couldn’t hear.  After a while of watching me inch my way forward, they all started to scatter.  I yelled down to try to get them to stop but they either didn’t hear me or they didn’t care.  I considered jumping; I wasn’t doing that good walking anyway, but before I could talk myself into it I slipped and fell off the rope.  As I shot towards the ground I reached my hand back up in a desperate attempt to save myself.  I didn’t want to die; I wanted to see what was on the other side of the rope.  Unlike every other dream throughout my life where falling was involved this time I didn’t wake up before I hit the ground.  I felt the impact of the cement; it felt like twenty people simultaneously whacking me with baseball bats.  But I didn’t die; when I got my bearings I rolled over and looked up.  My past, the people from it, were staring through me.  Some were rolling their eyes, others were laughing.  From above them I saw something descending down like a rocket.  Right before impact I woke up.

That morning, on my way to work, I couldn’t shake the dream.  On top of that I had to have Emma, The Great Gatsby, The Cleveland Connection, and Tess Of The D’Urbervilles read by the end of the week; two of them I also had journals due on, the other two I had to write papers about.  For my Fiction Workshop, I had to write the first draft of a story.  My grandmother was sick; her mind was abandoning her.  I wanted to try and work things out with the girl, but I was didn’t feel confident in what I had to say so I didn’t say anything.  My job was mindless to begin with—mopping the lobby, vacuuming the hallways, changing light bulbs—and having too much time to think only made matters worse.  The only thing I was looking forward to was the release of Bob Dylan’s Love & Theft.  It was Monday; I had one more day to wait.  I’d been counting off the days like a kid does towards Christmas; even if everything else was doing me wrong at least there would be Dylan.  After my four-hour shift, as I was packing up my stuff to leave a current day’s newspaper was sitting beside my bag.  For some reason—beyond the Sports section I’d never really read USA Today—I grabbed the paper and stuffed it in my bag.

I drove back to campus; bs’d my way through my full day of classes, and went back to my apartment.  My roommates weren’t home, and I didn’t feel like being alone so I walked over to my friend’s place, which was more or less a gathering place for everybody around.  We had a few drinks, talked about the new Madden football, about the upcoming baseball playoffs.  Right before I’d gone over to their place I checked my email.  I got a five-word one from the girl: “We’re dropping out of school.”  Sitting on my friend’s couch, drink in my hand, staring into the TV I felt like a volcano about to erupt.  All of the pressure in my body was focusing on my head.  I tried to take a deep breath but I couldn’t get any air.  Panicked, I ran out the open door, down two flights of steps, and in between their building and the one next to it.  I knew I was going to cry and I didn’t want anyone to see me doing it.  A friend of mine, my roommate that previous summer, he caught up to me just as the tears revealed themselves.  I was hysteric; one of those people you see in movies getting dragged out of the courtroom.  He braced me against the brick wall; to keep me from running, or falling, or doing whatever I had a mind to do, I don’t know.  He kept asking me what was wrong and after a while I shouted a bunch of gibberish about my grandmother being on the verge of dying, about how I couldn’t take six classes and forty hours of work each work, about how Thomas Hardy sucked, about how I couldn’t even afford the new Dylan CD, about how the girls were dropping out of college.  “They’re dropping out?” I heard him say over my own pathetic voice.  For some reason that calmed me enough to explain what I knew of the matter.  He had a vested interest; his ex-girlfriend, the same girl who’d sent me Jimmy Eat World lyrics and we became kindred spirits, she was one of the We’re, along with another mutual friend of ours.  In an instant, like some grand illusion, all of my emotion had transferred over to him.  Before I knew what we were doing we were on our way over to the dorm we used to live in, where the girls still did.  The three of them were sitting on the front stoop as if they knew we were coming.  Collectively they’d decided school wasn’t for them; they sold back all of their books, dropped all of their classes, and were on the way to purchase one-way bus tickets to Florida.  “Why?” we asked.  “Because,” was more or less their answer.  In the chaos of the conversation it ended up where the only two people left were the girl who, not even two weeks prior I thought was the one, and I.  We were sitting on the same bench we had six months earlier only the feeling in the air was an entire climate different.  The only thing I could really muster up to say was, “I’m sorry.”  And I was.

The next morning I was drained; tired from my lack of sleep, upset that I’d let my emotions show the way they had, betrayed by the fact that I seemingly had no control over the people I cared about.  As I walked out to my car the air gave me a boost.  The sky was clear blue as far as you could see; it was warm.  Despite my disposition it felt good to be alive.  I rolled down all my windows, opened up my sunroof, and tried to focus on how beautiful it was outside and the fact that in a couple of hours, one way or another, I’d be listening to Dylan’s new CD.  When I got to work, compartmentalized inside the cold walls of the hotel, the pep I had started to fade; reality was settling back in.

I was on the second floor vacuuming the hall when I heard a voice from behind me yelling something.  I turned the power on the vacuum off and turned around.  “You always talk about wanting to live in New York City but I don’t know why you’d want to live in a place where planes smash into buildings,” one of the maids said.  It took a minute to register what she was saying and even after it did I didn’t know how to respond.  “What are you talking about?” I asked.  “Some plane hit a building,” she said, “it’s on the news.”  The girl had always creeped me out, so instead of joining her in the room she was cleaning to see what she was referring to I took the elevator down to the lobby.  By the time I got there a few of the morning crowd were gathered around the television, their morning bagel or muffin in their hands.  Just as I got into position to see the television a plane crashed into a building.  I had no idea if this was a replay; if somehow what the maid was referring to had been caught on video.  For a second my eyes moved away from the fireball on TV to the right hand of the guy standing next to me, and the plastic cup of orange juice he just dropped.  Its descent towards the carpet I’d vacuumed just a half-hour earlier was like watching a DVD frame-by-frame.  By the time it finally hit the floor and erupted orange juice over everyone’s legs someone had screamed out, “Oh my God!”  It wasn’t a replay, or some Hollywood stunt.  This was real.

I don’t remember how long I stood in that same spot, my leg covered in orange juice, my eyes fixed on the television.  It was long enough for a third plane to crash into the Pentagon and a fourth one to crash a couple hours south of the hotel lobby where I was standing.  It was long enough to make me remember every last person I thought I forgot; the things I said to them, the things I wish I had.  It was long enough for me to reassess what the word love really meant, and how I wished more than anything that I had someone I was in love with right then so I could call them and make sure they were ok.  It was long enough for me to call my mother and tell her that I was alright, and that I loved her.  And it was long enough for me to breath and be scared just like everyone else standing around me.  After enough time passed, my boss came over and said, “We all have to go back to work,” I told her no; I couldn’t.  I walked back to the break room, started gathering up my stuff, and like the day before, the day’s paper was sitting next to my bag.  I threw the USA Today in my backpack, went out to my car, drove down the street to Best Buy and put Modern Times on my credit card.  I couldn’t really afford the CD, but felt like I couldn’t afford to not have the CD either.

There was a lot of uncertainty that day; classes were cancelled, everyone was told to spend time with their loved ones, with their friends.  Everyone gathered around televisions; we looked for answers, for a voice of reason: Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Wolf Blitzer weren’t prophets either; they were just as lost as the rest of us were, but they would do, and they did.

That night, in the campus gym, there was a candlelight vigil for the people killed in catastrophes.  I went with the girl who, depending on who was looking at it, was my ex-girlfriend.  We held hands when they played “Taps” and “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes; we shared tears and “I’m sorry’s.”  When I finally retired to myself, I wrote a few lines in the journal I was trying to keep.  It said something about the attacks on the Twin Towers, about how my previous day’s antics were stupid and selfish, something about carpe diem, something about love.  In times of tragedy we always become soothsayers of change.  Regrets weigh on us; they feel like ships with broken rudders we’re hell-bent on fixing.  We see that life really does come with an expiration date, that we’re not going to live forever, and we panic.  I was no different; I became an arbiter of second-chances.

From the first listen, “Mississippi” blew me away.  Dylan had hundreds of songs, hundreds of songs I knew and loved by heart, but this one was like a dagger right through my heart, and given the day’s events it made that much more sense:

“Got nothing for you, I had nothing before
Don’t even have anything for myself anymore
Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down
Nothing you can sell me, I’ll see you around”

I laid on my bed and listened, thinking of those lines, how prophetic they were.  I thought about faces of people I couldn’t see, people who woke up feeling the same hope I had when they saw how beautiful and blue the sky was, people who, like me, couldn’t wait to hear Dylan’s new CD, people who in a flash of fire never had the chance to hear “Mississippi” or say, “I’m gonna look at you ‘til my eyes go blind” one last time.  To this day this is one of Dylan’s most endearing lines to me.  It’s both beautiful and haunting, an endearment just as much it could be a threat.  That night, I picture couples sitting on swings, staring into each other’s eyes, listening to that song together.  Before it would get to the end one of them would disappear.

“Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees
Feeling like a stranger nobody sees
So many things that we never will undo
I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too”

Regret is a motherf**ker; I never wanted to feel it again.

The next day I went to work.  I went through the motions.  When it was time to leave I packed up my backpack; I grabbed the USA Today again and put it with the previous two day’s editions.  That night, after another long day of watching CNN, I sat in my room, I listened to Love & Theft, and I looked over the three newspapers, at the sequence of headlines from one day to the next; from the self-important to the sublime to the surreal.

“Po Boy” was another song that from first-listen found my ears well.

“Knockin’ on the door, I say, “Who is it and where are you from?”
Man says, “Freddy!” I say, “Freddy who?” He says, “Freddy or not here I come.”
Poor boy ‘neath the stars that shine
Washin’ them dishes, feedin’ them swine”

As close to the apocalypse as people felt they were, sooner or later they were going to have to stop waiting for the knockout punch to come and start putting one foot in front of the other again; they had to move on.  After a week or so I turned off CNN and became a hypocrite like so many others did.  I went back to ignoring the library of books I had to read, to putting off papers I had to write, to pining over the one who got away.  In life, we all have a part to play.  Most of us aren’t as noble as we’d like to be, as sympathetic as claim to be, or as motivated as we promise to be in the future.  The future for me was already a thing of the past; I wasn’t ready for a new position just yet; it would still be months before I could truly appreciate “Summer Days” for what it could be, before I could give in to my feet and let them dance again.

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.