our days were numbered by nights on too many rooftops
you know, this is going to sound kind of ridiculous.
but i sorta-kinda-miss all that crazy fucking drama from the last five years. FIVE YEARS. just typing that gave me a cold chill. it's been five years since my first brickhouse show. FIVE years since i've met and added friends to my FAMILY. almost five years from when i first laid eyes on derek at a hardcore brickhouse show. it's 1/4 of my life, and almost all of my formative years.
sometimes, i miss the scene. i don't mean the "scene" as fall out boy's ode to arm racing, i just mean life-outside-all-the-dumb-fucks-i-went-to-real-high-school-with. the best friends, the late nights, the gossip and the latest girls, the dumb shit, the drama, the hook ups, the crying, tony bush ruining half of my girlfriends' lives, lucas delpapa ruining the other half, derek and i stirring a drama pot so thick we woke up neighborhoods and put holes in walls, hyamp, the brickhouse, everyone always talking about how "something corporate ALMOST played the brickhouse but the piano wouldn't fit", everyone always talking about kim brown from chicago and how everyone shit in her microwave and yet NOONE other than the band boys knew who she was, making fun of girls from michigan, meeting all sorts of people that became friends with the boys on tour, STILL making fun of girls from michigan with all the sorts of people that knew the boys from tour, "subway cups" at shows, lying to our parents about said shows, lying to our parents about pretty much everything, our parents actually giving a shit if we lied to them, kara's basement, rita's living room, rita's "bricks", lighting phonebooks on fire, massive amounts of aftershock and malt liquor, just drinking in general because god knows we're too old & tired now, no responsibilities, thinking that we had 39483094 responsibilities, the web of friends who shared bedmates and beds, the late-night gossipfests discussing those who shared bedmates and beds, vague livejournal entries, gag-enducing myspace comments littered with "i love you mores!" and "you're AWESOMES!", myspace before old people were allowed to join, 30G ipods being nothing short of elephant music pens, saves the day singalongs, bonfires at the kols', fort hill gang wars, the dances, the proms, the borrowing of dresses for the dances and the proms, the boyfriends/the girlfriends, the short-lived relationships and the long-winded relationships, the fall formals where old hair bands made a comeback or skinny pale white boys wore polyester suits, the constantly having to be picked up and carted around in others' cars because you don't get your driver's license till your 18, having the coveted role of being the official "music decider" in cars because you're constantly being carted around, the 10+ person singalongs, driving around TO singalong, driving around to smoke pot because rita won't let you in her backyard, GO TAD, go tad's formation after a long drunken night complete with barcadi and preperation h, GO SAM to include pretty much everyone we'd ever known thanks to the legend, jared figuring out what GO SAM and GO TAD meant and pretty much almost ruining it, drawn-in purple mustaches, real bonafide hairy handlebar mustaches, waking up jon and jared in the middle of the afternoon at their house by breaking in, skivving school during lunch to do said breaking in, when "scenes from a movie" meant set fire and crash & burn, when "time and distance" meant snap and 10-21-02, when music in general meant SOMETHING, when having songs and albums before their release date was something close to a miracle, when you not-so-secretly wished your boyfriend would tour with midtown so gabe saporta would fall in love with you and write a song about never getting to be with you, when midtown EXISTED, when good music EXISTED, when "best friends means friends forever" was littered on away messages/profiles/life, when away messages/profiles were probably more analyzed and painstakenly constructed than life, when life was simpler/funnier/ridiculouser/dramaticer; when we were just nothing more than a bunch of young, egotistical high school kids running around with a stick up our asses and a swagger in our step. and probably too much eye-makeup. our closets had more white belts and slip-ons than you could shake a stick at, and people actually carried messenger bags with pins and wore chucks so destroyed and marked on they resembled hobo hats. before the neon color tsunami soaked the world, before american apparel, before the internet made its mark on all the chicken-shit but sometimes clever weinerbags of the world, before gabe saporta lost his damn mind, before hip-hoppers knew what "the scene" even was, before auto-tuned to hell meant talent, before the actual word "scene" came to mean anything other than a group of people who don't quite fit in anywhere else but are bound together by music, friendship, and a mutual appreciation for the other, before the scene was lost to a sea of clandestine-wearing, macbook-weilding, shitty imitation fucks, before "huntington" meant "town where i live", before the dissolution and disenchantment of west virginia's alternative music landscape, before the dissolution and disenchantment that we most of us found in each other, before so many of us moved on to the mundanity and manality of getting older, before so many of us moved on past friends and into a blurred enemy/ignoring state.
i'm not going to quote some fucking band lyric here, as i would have five years ago, but i will say this. soon i'll be going to grad school, and i'll be moving out and away from this seemingly-backwards-yet-so-involved state. going to marshall allowed me to extend the honeymoon of the end of adolescence, but soon the real marriage to getting older is going to set in. already, i can feel it coming. i don't really go out (hardly), my friends and i get together to shop/study/watch movies but not drink, i can't tell you the last time i had something dramatic happen to me, my idea of a good time is a night without homework/studying, and i'm actually TEACHING the very same high school kids i WAS PART OF just three short years ago. it's just been slow & steady for the last year or so, with cartrips/exciting developments in my career/best friend hangouts/funny moments but always creeping towards the inevitability of maturity. don't get me wrong; i'm unbelievably happy and i do not want for a single thing. my life is exciting as it ever was (i'm going to freaking HAWAII for spring break) and i DEFINITELY don't want the high school drama to weed back in (i'm too old, cynical, and hateful for it now), but seriously. i'm glad that all that drama, all that craziness, all that intesity HAPPENED. it shaped me, my friends, my outlook, my future, my life.
oh fuck it.
stay up all night and sleep all day,
we were smart kids with too much to say.
and we were so, so sure that they were missing out,
they're the ones who were missing out, and
we were elemental, talked down to bare essentials,
who knew we'd get so far?
cause our days were numbered by nights on too many rooftops.
they said we'd burn so bright.
we'd burn this city and go.
play it again,(our games of love and lust)
there's no such thing (no there's never too much).
and we were so, so sure, No we never had a doubt.
we were counting down days to getting out.
we were elemental, talked down to bare essentials.
who knew we'd get so far?(Who knew we'd get so far?)
cause our days were numbered by nights on too many rooftops.
they said we're wasting our lives,
at least we know that if we die
we lived with passion
they said we'd burn so bright
we'd burn this city and GO.