Is it strange that I can chart the course of my life through Rise Against lyrics? Because I can. I mean, maybe it's because they were one of the first bands I really loved, but I can trace my evolution as a person based on what songs I connect to. I used to connect to some of their more hardcore and angsty tracks back when I thought I was hardcore and angsty. Then later I got into some of their, as I have come to call them, "broken heart ballads" like "Anywhere But Here". Now I'm in the painful process that they call growing up and my song preference has changed. Before the lyrics of "Rumors of My Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated" were a Rosetta stone on how I function as a person, but now I'm growing out of the lyrics of "Pages torn from books we never read/Cause we're plugged into this grid./Don't pull this plug right now,/Or then we'd really have to live." Its honestly a bit frightening really.
I'm no longer concerned with the matters of "When I die, will they remember not/What I did, but what I haven't done?/It's not the end that I fear with each breath/It's life that scares me to death." In fact life is less frightening to me now that I've learned how to deal with the monsters of memory and the dragons of new days. And honestly I'm not sure how I feel about that. I find it strange, but I miss feeling that sadness. I miss the feeling of being special because I'm sad. Because being depressed does have a glamor to it, I mean, hell we have genres devoted to it.
But to cut a ramble short, it's nice and scary at the same time to grow up and Rise Against is kinda like my barometer for telling how I'm doing I guess.
