Midway

(album: I'll Leave The Light On Just In Case - 2019)

You built yourself into a brand, gave it your best and drank your own Kool-Aid, believed your own hype, and now the party never ends
You were sitting in an airport watching a man yell at his children
You wanted to grab him by the collar, lift him up to the heavens and scream, "This is who you all are
You people won't just learn to live"
Your flight landed and you drove home
The first thing you did was put a sprinkler on the end of a hose
You then climbed up on your roof using an old rickety ladder, and began nailing the sprinkler onto the top, right above your bedroom
And every night, a timer goes off at 9 pm and the water turns on
And you thought to yourself, "Maybe I don't live with her anymore, maybe I'm not under her roof, maybe she won't be here anymore, but if she lives through a storm, I want to feel the rain, too."
One morning you woke up and your mother asked, "Why are you still smoking pot and playing punk rock?"
She begged for you to come back to church, and you replied, "Drugs are a guaranteed experience
With religion, sometimes I found a home and sometimes I just found a bunch of bigots."
It's nothing new, the same story everyone tells
I only believed in my mom 'cause I was afraid of hell
The next day you had a show at a dive bar, and you thought you saw your dad in the crowd and the whole time you were on stage it's all you could think about
You wondered why you were so angry
That the girl from the night before didn't follow you on Twitter
Somehow in your reptilian brain you created a bond between women and rejection, and now you hate them, but you don't know it
Because your hate doesn't manifest as violence
It manifests as you trying to control them
Or saying you're trying to protect them
As these realizations finally entered your mind, you thought
"When did this happen, when did I become so jaded? Was it when she left, when I lost the perfect woman? Why don't I understand them? When did women even become a 'them'? Why am I like this?"
But the show is still happening, so you snap out of it, smoke a Marlboro Red in the bathroom
Drink a cheap energy drink and sing Radiohead's "Creep" in your head as you walk toward the greenroom
Your buddy Chris brought ketamine-infused joints, so you took a hit
As a promoter entered with cleaning solvent, as he began to wipe down a table, his phone rang, he saw a picture of his girlfriend on it, showed it to the band and said, "Let me introduce you to my problem"
As the promoter took the call, Chris turned to the others and continued on over a speech he had most likely prepared the night before, but would soon deliver as if it was an original thought happening in the moment
He said, "When a band changes their sound, the fans blame it on the label, saying that they've been forced into a corner to be more marketable, not realizing the band just grew up
But people know more about the band than the band knows about themselves and people in the same way"
You looked around and saw that everyone was elevated, and said, "I have to leave"
Then began to skate home, and once you got there, the first thing you did was turn on the sprinkler
Laid on the hardwood floor, called your mom and left a voicemail and said
"Part of love is suffering when you lose it
And I lost who I am"