Tales from the Megabus Bathroom

by Emma Keyes

The low point of St. Patrick’s Day 2016? Easy: just outside of White Marsh (which for some reason is the Baltimore dropoff—I pity the good people of Baltimore who have to hike it so far out of their city to catch the bus) I puked in the bathroom of the Megabus. It would be a lie to say that this particular experience had been on my bucket list, but I’ve now crossed it off regardless. I don’t usually get car sick anymore, but maybe it had something to do with the fact that I hadn’t really eaten any fruits or vegetables in six days. I’d been living off honey-nut cheerios, peanut butter sandwiches, and various kinds of takeout since spring break started. Ah, the glamorous life of a college student.

As I listlessly stared out the window, post-puking incident, at the exurbs of Maryland whizzing by, a song I hadn’t thought about in years somehow worked its way into my mind. Before I knew it I was listening to “Far Behind” by Social Distortion. I was worried initially, as I started to look through my music, that I’d taken my Social Distortion greatest hits album off my phone in the years between my last listen and now, but thankfully past me was looking out for present me. “Far Behind” it was.

I don’t know what it means to return to a song or an album or a band after so long, but there was something so immediately satisfying about already knowing all the words to a song I thought I’d forgotten. This band was never a particular phase for me (unlike Green Day, as every other person who has ever been in the seventh grade can attest), but I definitely used to listen to them pretty regularly. I even saw them in concert with my brother and my mom’s boyfriend when I was in the eighth grade (I’m guessing—I could dig up my concert ticket and check, but I’m not going to).

Sitting on the bus approaching my hometown of Washington, DC, I listened to the rest of the Social Distortion album. Their greatest hits are good songs. I just looked the band up and I had no idea that they’d been around so long. I’m half the age of the band, which is wild to me because for some reason I’d assumed that all of their music was concentrated in the ’90s, but it turns out most of the songs I know so well were released by 1990 at the latest. It would be a lie to say I know any of their more recent music. I predominantly listened to this band, which still makes music, in the late 2000s, but the songs I loved were already nearing on twenty years old. The disconnect between the present for me then and the present for the band then, as I understood it, was wide. I guess it’s hard to blame an eighth grader for that.

What is it that causes us to move on from some bands and not others? In the long run, I’ve definitely abandoned more bands than I’ve stuck with for the duration, but I have no idea what it is about the groups I still listen to that allowed them to make the cut. And I don’t know what it was about that particular moment barreling down I–95 that made me return to a band that didn’t make the cut. Does that mean it did pass? I can’t really answer these questions, but I don’t think this makes them any less valid.

Analyzing my own behavior makes me wonder what other bands I should listen to again. It was probably unfair for me to so thoroughly give up Green Day once my phase was over, but I put them in a mental box and said to myself, “Well, that was vaguely embarrassing. Now onto cooler things.” It was probably for the better that I moved on from Green Day, but American Idiot is still a great album. McFly is a fluffy British pop-rock band, but Motion in the Ocean was the first album I ever bought and I feel like I should return to it for nostalgia’s sake if for nothing else. I haven’t listened to Arcade Fire’s Funeral in ages. There are so many bands and albums that I’ve loved in the past, but that I haven’t bothered to play in too long. I’m all for avoiding a stagnation of musical taste—I don’t want to end up as the equivalent of a middle-aged man who still only listens to Led Zeppelin—but I do think there is value in reexamining the music that was important to our past selves. I don’t think I’ve changed enough in my life for the music of my past to have become inaccessible to me now, but who knows. After the Social Distortion album finished, I cued up the Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America and watched the streets of Northeast DC roll by.