Artist: Counting Crows
Album: Recovering the Satellites
My senior year of college was the only year that I had a car on campus. That was actually the first year that I had a car that was mine and that I wasn’t sharing with my momma or my brothers or sister. That car was really special to me, and it became a huge part of my life. Sometimes I think that car might have saved me from myself.
This was also the only year that I didn’t live in a dorm room. Six of us (five girls and one boy) rented a house our near the beach because our wonderful college did not have enough housing for the senior class. This wouldn’t have been so hard to swallow if our lottery number was like 372, but considering we were like number 32 or something, it was a bit frustrating…to the point that security may have been called on a roommate the day of the lottery for freaking out about how absolutely unfair this was, but that is besides the point.
Anyway, as is the case generally with such a group, things were not always smooth sailing living in the house. Most of the time we all got along without too much of an issue, but every once in a while things would boil over and all five girls would PMS at once or something, but it would get ugly in there. These were the nights where I would decide that I needed to go home after my last class, even if it was after ten before I even got out of class. The two hour drive home was always much shorter than that late at night, and I got a lot of thinking done in that car with the stereo turned all the way up.
While I remember making the trip home quite often over the course of my time at school, one night stands out in particular, and it was the night that I decided to listen to Recovering the Satellites on the drive.
It was a clear night, no rain or anything like that, and I was the only car on the road. There had been some fairly highly-charged issues inside of our house, and I knew that not only was I unhappy being there, but that I was not in the mood to deal with the situation that particular night, so after class I came home and packed some things and took off for home. I used to take 295S home instead of the Turnpike, because even though it added about 15 minutes to my trip, it saved me 1.15, and as a poor college kid, that 1.15 every trip added up. I almost always have Recovering the Satellites in my visor CD holder, but I kind of fight with myself about listening to it. Its kind of like eating goldfish crackers-I think they are going to be bland, and then I eat some and remember how much I love them. Anyway, I was in one of those moods, so I figured that CD fit the setting, and I popped it into my Discman. (Rhu was an old car, and only had a tape deck, so I had to do the whole Discman-to-adapter deal in the car.) This was also the night that I decided that this was my favorite Counting Crows album, and that i wanted that shooting star tattooed on my wrist.
At some point along 295S, in the middle of the night, with the windows up and the radio cranked, I figured everything out while the song Monkey was playing, but sadly, by the end of the album nothing made sense again. As strange as that moment of clarity was, I find it stranger that I can remember the exact moment. I find myself wanting to go back to that moment to see now what I saw then, but I think that I might be figuring it all out again, 10 years later.
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