Summer Song Challenge, Day 22: Joe

Prompt: "A song that's over seven minutes long"

Selected by Joe

"It's All Gonna Break"

Broken Social Scene

Broken Social Scene, 2005

I promised we'd be back, but I didn't think it would be so soon. Back to Senior Week in Ocean City, June 2007. Not literally, just in memory, as these things usually go. I wouldn't want to go back anyway, even if I could. Some memories are better trapped in amber than cracked open and toyed with.

One of the great struggles in life is what the normies call "living in the moment." It's a cliché because it's tested and true. The present moment may seem tough but one day you will assuredly look back at it and wish that things were better now like they were then. Either we tend to romanticize the past or life truly does get more complicated as we get older. Probably both.

Senior Week was one of those "moments" when I got the closest to closing the gap and appreciating the moment for what it is—crucially, while I was living those moments. I wouldn't necessarily say anything special or world-altering happened during those seven days, but I definitely knew at the time that things were never going to be like this again. Sure, I had college approaching, and many of the characteristics of Senior Week would repeat themselves over a much larger time period in the subsequent years (e.g. living on my own, drinking enough to convince myself I was happy), but never again in this place, with these people.

"This place" was the town of Ocean City, NJ. "These people" was pretty much every prep school kid I had met over the past four years. I was living with the theater kids, but there were houses filled with people we knew and loved spread out over the town like constellations. There was enough drinking that me and Drew filled up his trunk with beer from Krewstown Beer and we were out by the second day. There were shenanigans that resulted in expulsions from houses and a dash of police activity. There was the mass cashing in of romantic checks that had been postdated at some point in our senior year. I wouldn't be lying if I said that all those things combined resulted in a little bit of drama.

I was living with the theater kids, if you'll recall. I referred to "theater drama" as synonymous with "bravery" the other day, but also let's call that shit what it occasionally was: normal petty teenage drunken hormonal stupidity. I don't even remember what was going on in that house. The complications of teenage romance, all the stuff that looks so serious in the moment but so silly in retrospect. I wasn't dating anyone in the house and I didn't shit where I ate, so I personally didn't have anything to worry about (there was a friend who lived there who had just two months prior told me that she didn't believe in god anymore because of me, but I think even she knew by the time we were temporary roommates that that had been a bit of an overstatement).

From my drunken hazy perspective, I thought "It's All Gonna Break" by Broken Social Scene fit the mood in that house by the end of the week. It's an incredible large and cathartic song, all the power of a sledgehammer to the face. The mantra of "it's all gonna break" feels at once apocalyptic and also strangely calming, a kind of come-what-may philosophy that spoke to the importance of accepting the good with the bad and living your best life anyway.

Somehow—maybe I really can get more in touch with my optimism while shitfaced, which is scary to think about—I was able to see that in the moment. I took one sip of my third lunchtime Lionshead of the afternoon and I was transported twenty years into the future, could see that I wouldn't remember who was mad at whom and who had devilishly made out with whom and who was pissed that the made out had happened in the first place, but that I would just remember that feeling of being young but free, two feelings that rarely collide, and that, in order to mark the occasion of self-awareness, and also because it's funny to lampshade the drama at a removed distance, we'd need a song. "It's All Gonna Break" was the perfect choice.

"I know that you're dying, I know that it's true." It was! And I did know it! And I lived like there was no tomorrow. Tomorrow eventually came, a long string of tomorrows that leads to today. I'm definitely at the point where I'm not, like, pining for those days anymore. But it still brings me great joy to think about the hilarity and calamity of being that age, living how we lived on Senior Week, knowing that it would eventually all break, and living as best we could anyway.