Wake Me Up When September Ends

I got into American Idiot the summer after I graduated high school. Here’s an embarrassing story about me: Watching the video for Jesus of Suburbia played a not insignificant part in making me think “Drop out of college and move to Portland”. The catalysts for me actually doing so, months later, were bigger than a music video, as you might imagine, but the inspiration there was real. Being eighteen, man.

I watch it now and…well, you know. Or if you don’t know, trust me when I say you don’t need to know, or at least I certainly can’t advise it. (“You are nothing but a pair of tits.” Uh-huh, incredible work Green Day.)

Years later, in The Hungarian Pastry Shop, a Columbia hangout on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the kind of funky student-haunt cafe that if you were used to suburbia you would just come in and go, “WOW,” I went into the bathroom and someone had written in big Sharpie on the ceiling: “I’M THE SON OF RAGE AND LOVE”. I was twenty-four then, maybe twenty-five, and I snorted at how young I imagined that person was.