Photograph

IM pretty sure you've heard the new single from Nickelback titled Photograph. If not, its about a guy who goes back home to thumb through his photo album he has in his old room. While looking for a picture of a friend of his, he starts remembering all the classic moments of his youth, arcade shenanigans, public school expulsion, wondering how his eyes got so red...

If you haven't heard it, its a pretty haunting song. Not as haunting as a leftover bean & churro burrito, but haunting in the sense that it makes you stop and remember your days of forgotten youth. I actually sat in the car one afternoon listening to the song and was at the verge of crying out of regret that I didn't take pictures of my school days like the penman of the song.

Then, I snapped out of it and started to think to myself what self conscious person would take a camera with them to school & other social gatherings and snap pictures of hijinks & random acts of stupidity (and no, even though this fits me and my friends in school)? I honestly don't know of many people who I went to school with who decided to take a camera with them and docudrama their lives in a mosaic that just rests at the bottom of their picture drawer.

I also started to think to myself if it was just me & El Paso's small town mentality, because there are people who swore up one side and down the other about how their high school lives were just the toast of the town and wouldn't mind reliving them again. I remember mine only when I meet someone from my past and am reminded how bitter and distrustful I became because of these people. I did meet the brother of a tormenter of mine and found that the rest of the family didn't share his disposition on people.

I bought my yearbook. Class of 1997. It sits in a drawer in my closet, hidden from the light, only emerging when I thumb through the contents of that drawer for a forgotten CD or to gaze upon my rather small Anime action figure collection. Usually its pushed to the side or placed out of the way, and seldom opened to remind myself of the people I didn't want anything to do with, and to an extent, still don't.

I listen to Nickelback's song and love the composition of the piece, the way the author of the song relives the highlights of his youth and gives that slight pregnant pause in thought that maybe he's looking for the photo of a friend because they aren't around anymore for unknown reasons and makes you just ever so poignantly sad because of this rather ambiguous context of searching for old photos of friends.

I think I will keep this song in my mind a musical journey through the storytellers past, not of my own.