In high school the beginning of autumn...
…was marked not by national holidays or first school days or even by solar equinox but by the increased frequency with which we listened to Third Eye Blind’s first album. I say this now, as I did then, with tremendous pride. We stuffed our handbags full of Diet Coke cans, slipped Merrells on our feet, and booked it to Northpark Mall, and somewhere between the garage and the first right turn onto Murphy Boulevard, we cranked “Motorcycle Drive-By” so loudly that had we owned cell phones, we would not have heard them ring or even vibrate, so strongly did the bass line buzz through GM standard issue speakers.
We blasted Third Eye Blind, and we pouted our Bonne Belle-glossed lips in the rearview mirror, and we wondered aloud about eligible varsity soccer players’ attendance at various farm field parties, and we tugged on our Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirts, and summer in fact did die, and swells did rise (to recall a particular tear-inducing lyric). Another year would pass before we matched Nokia face plates to our leopard-print bandeau tops, and several more before “text” became a verb rather than a dreaded type of hardcover book.
Autumn in Missouri is a misnomer; the flora flashes from green to brown sometime in August with brief blazes of red appearing at the tail end of September only to wither within days. All the while the mercury hovers above eighty. Our sweatshirts, our jeans were horribly mistaken. But OH MY GOD what frigid, wintry waves of feeling crashed in our poster-bedecked bedrooms as we clutched stuffed teddies and ragged Cosmopolitans (dog-eared on the love quiz pages). How we wailed to one another about the futility of our young lives, pausing only to chew another Twizzler and turn the volume nob up, up, as Stephen Jenkins waged battle with the lead guitar and verbalized all our angst, all our grief and fury and confusion telescoped and aimed like little slingshot pellets at the poor objects of our affection, now spitting Skoll in old Dr. Pepper bottles, now suffering pre-season two-a-day football practice, now hoisting mountain bikes over the tailgates of Toyota pick-up trucks.
The sound of an amplifier flicks on. Feedback. A nameless drummer counts to four. Autumn began with a burst of sound, and we were fourteen, and we would live forever, and our lives, our skinny, Maybelline-spackled, freshman lives already seemed over. It was all so dramatic in 1999.
