The full explanation of what’s going on with this is available here, but the short version is that over this month we’re doing a little essay-ish series connected to eleven songs I associate with August. They’re organized like an album, in the order listed below. Some of the writings will be more focused on the songs than others, and this is all vague enough in general that we don’t know exactly how it’s going to go. We’re finding out. Today, we’re onto Track 5.
Side A
1. “August and Everything After” – Counting Crows
2. “Untitled (Love Song)” – Counting Crows
3. “Goodnight L.A.” – Counting Crows
4. “Wildest Dreams” – Taylor Swift
5. “Coming Home” – Diddy – Dirty Money, Skylar Grey
Side B
6. “Rockin’ the Suburbs” – Ben Folds
7. “Meet Virginia” – Train
8. “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” – Paul Simon
9. “Paper Planes” – M.I.A.
10. “Satellite Call” – Sara Bareilles
11. “L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.” – Noah and the Whale
If you use Apple Music, a good friend and reader has put together a playlist of Tracks 2 through 11 here.
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It’s a bit of a dramatic thing to do, using a song to try to encourage some narrative in your own life. But it’s effective, often, at least in the moment. Songs make you feel things. They help you feel things you want to feel. They help you process things you’d, all equal, rather not feel. They don’t just put words to feelings, but they add this primal connection of pitch and rhythm, pushing past the limits of language.
We spoke last week about rock bottom, and specifically about a particularly firm rock bottom I experienced at the tail end of my last high school summer, one punctuated by a trip out East to visit colleges. Track 1 was about rock bottom, and about processing rock bottom, and about a time that song helped me process rock bottom rather concretely. But after rock bottom, something comes next. Something has to come next. And in the case of that summer’s rock bottom, the thing that came next was high school cross country.
I was not a particularly good high school cross country runner, which is to say that I was serviceable, I had some strong races, and my entire career would have been void of competitive significance were it not for its presence amidst one of the more successful programs in the state of Illinois and its adjacency to the careers of two All-State, future Division I runners (who happened to each be extraordinarily kind high school men) and a pack of athletic guys who worked hard. I’ve written about the program before on this site. I’ve written about the coach. But to put my own experience most simply, Alex and Christopher were talented enough and smart enough and willing enough to suffer great pain that I was afforded the possibility of making a difference for a team in a state championship competition. I did not wind up making a difference in a state championship (I did make a difference in a half of a conference championship, which was fun), but the possibility was there. And I loved the possibility.
Winning state titles in high school was one of the foundational dreams of my childhood. Dreams got vague after high school—their possibilities more obviously narrow, their natures more exclusionary of one another—but as a child, reading Chip Hilton books and watching Friday Night Lights (the movie, I never got much into the show), winning a state championship was among the greatest of my ambitions. My high school’s state finalist trophies sit in a beautiful display case in the foyer of a massive, complex, balconied and tunneled fieldhouse. I wanted my name upon one. Alex, and Christopher, and a group of men a year older than me and a coach who’d spent decades building this high school running program, gave me that chance.
It wasn’t a chance that worked out. We were not good enough, I was not good enough, the ceiling of our potential was likely always lower than a championship (though I almost snuck my way onto a second or third-place trophy as an alternate when I was a junior, having contributed nothing but hijinks). But I didn’t know that coming back from that trip out East.
The trip had been a good one. We’d spent a few days in Philadelphia, the greatest of the four big East Coast cities because it’s the only one that’s self-aware. I’d loved Ithaca as much as I thought I would. Princeton had stoked some curiosity. The fact I was considering Ivy League schools in the first place was a confidence jolt, a reflection of my academic capability and a hint that I had some of the same stuff in me as some of those whose names have cut deeply into the stones of history. It was ego-boosting, but also hurt-soothing, and while I was fairly certain I was going to Notre Dame, it was fun to picture myself elsewhere—amidst the hills of Cornell; amidst the stateliness of Princeton. It was a reminder that in a year, I would be moving on from high school, and that high school included some dejecting aspects from which it would be freeing to move on. It was also a reminder that I had the option to do so in a rather clean-cut manner, moving a flight away from home, to one of two places where I would likely know no one.
We flew back a day or two before Hell Week, that first week and a half of sanctioned practice. Two-a-days, a 15-mile Saturday morning run, afternoon hill and track workouts in the blazing August sun. I’d run a little over the trip, but only a little, and my legs were fresh, so when we got back from O’Hare, I changed and bathroomed and went for a run, one of those runs where my pace was quick and my feet bounced and it felt like I was holding back from full-on attacking the pavement with myself—a coiled spring of a body. Before I went on the run, though, I listened to a song. “Coming Home,” our Track 5 to August.
It had been running through my head all day. Specifically, the hook: the Skylar Grey part, that beautiful and simple and beautifully simple hook. It didn’t perfectly apply. It hardly applied, really. But the overall sentiment, one of returning home and reengaging with one’s world—that resonated. Rock bottom was in the rearview. I was coming home.
I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere in these how the prominence of school calendars in so much of our lives makes August a month of transition. This would exist without school calendars, too, but some of the aspect of summer’s end would be pushed to September, where the solar calendar has it, and the thing would be much more gradient. I saw August described on Twitter yesterday as “if Sunday were a month.” For most of my life, especially in the higher-leverage parts of it, the Sunday night aspect of the month came right in the middle. That’s when school started. That’s when sanctioned practice began. That’s when I’d go back to college. Even now, in a job highly tied to college football, this element persists. Even now, in a town that bursts forth from dormancy as college students pour into one neighborhood and seep into the rest of the city, this element persists. Track 1 was a feeling of a Sunday night, or perhaps a really bad Saturday. Track 5, as August turns, feels like the best kind of Monday morning.
That was fun to read. 👍