The Waiting: Green Day-Inspired Poetry (and Other Philosophical Musings)

So I was listening to American Idiot in its entirety today, for the first time in probably a few years. While doing the dishes, because apparently punk rock from my teenage years makes me feel productive.

But it made me feel a lot of other things. There are two songs in particular on that album that have a very peculiar effect on me.

"Wake Me Up When September Ends" is, in a literal sense, about the death of Billie's father. But in a more subtle and indirect sense, it's about these moments where you realize that nothing can ever be the same as it was. That's something I've always struggled with. And it's strange, because...that's life. It's not something some people just get unlucky and get stuck with. It's the natural, inescapable order of being alive. But it's hard for me, and I spend a lot of time wishing I could go back, wishing things could be like they were.

The other song is "Are We the Waiting." I used to listen to that song while walking around my hometown late at night. I have a complicated relationship with my hometown; I felt so suffocated by it when I lived there.

Are we we are, are we we are the waiting unknown
This dirty town was burning down in my dreams
Lost and found city bound in my dreams

I wanted to burn the place down. I wanted to destroy it because it represented my other biggest fear: Complacency. I grew up in the kind of town where my friends, their parents, and their grandparents all lived within a few blocks of each other. Generation after generation, they all stayed in the same place to do the same things, or so it seemed at the time. I always felt I needed something bigger.

But after all these years I look back on it with that nostalgia I described before--the overwhelming desire to have things be the way they were--and it creates a whole other kind of nostalgia. There's this parallelism in my mind, of the life I'm living now and the life I always thought I'd be living. The person I am and the person I always thought I'd turn out to be. And even though I'm happy with the person I am, and mostly happy with the life I'm living, I have this strange desire to go back to that point I described where you realize nothing can ever be the same. And I both want to stay in the world that existed before that moment, and at the same time want to move forward from that moment toward the path I thought I'd take. Even still, I want to be the person I am now amid it all. To live my current life, live that parallel life, and perpetually stay in the moment before the moment when everything changed, all at once.

So I wrote a poem about it. As I do.

I'm not sure if I managed to put all that into this poem, but it was just a freewrite I did. Maybe one of these days I'll go back through all my old freewrites and polish the up a bit. But then again, maybe not.