Tuesday November 21st - Morning

Day 152, Session 52:
Location: In my holding pen at the cube farm... er, at work.
First song: Cold Fire by Rush
Last full song: Come Down by Toad the Wet Sprocket
Progress: 649-658 of 4446
Total Songs Heard: 606

Toad seems to fixate on certain words and phrases in their song titles. They had 4 different songs that started with the word "all." Now I hit 2 different songs with strikingly similar titles Come Down and Come Back Down. That's the sort of thing that I think I'd notice if I was in a band. I might look around and ask if anyone else thought our song titles were starting to sound overly familiar. Eventually, I might just ask if we could name the next song "Pants" just so they'd all stop sounding the same.

My senior year of high school... Christmas break. I was visiting my parents (I didn't live with my parents senior year of high school, a story for another time perhaps.) I received "Pale" by Toad the Wet Sprocket as a gift (on cassette!) I got a call from my girlfriend.

In high school I sang in the chorus, which because we were uppity, were officially called Chamber Singers. I was good enough, but not great. Lucky for me, there weren't any other guys in my school willing to sing bass, so I always seemed better than I actually was. I auditioned for district chorus my junior year. My audition went horribly. They had us audition on a song that had no words... so it was basically humming (a capella) 16 bars of music. Once I lost my place in that I had no way to get back. As I left the room, feeling more than a little embarrassed, the first person I saw was my friend Seth. He was a year older and quite a performer. We weren't particularly close outside of music stuff, but we got along well enough. I half-jokingly collapsed into his arms when he asked me how it went. It went poorly, but Seth reminded me immediately that there was always next year.

A year later, I was a senior and the chorus, er Chamber Singers, were performing in the basement of the library (I guess that counts as a chamber) sometime near Thanksgiving. Seth must have been on break from college because he came to see the show. After the show he came up and gave big hugs to everyone. For some reason, that particular night I wasn't in the mood for a hug. I mostly turned away from it and took off shortly after the show without doing much catching up.

A month later, I got that call from my girlfriend. Seth had died at school. To this day, I'm still not sure exactly what happened, other than it was not drug, alcohol or suicide related. I think he had some sort of infection which made its way to his heart, but I'm not sure. After some tears and hanging up the phone, I went upstairs to my room, turned off the lights and listened to "Pale." Come Back Down is not my favorite song from that album, but it's the song I remember hearing that day. It's the song I remember hearing as I thought about the fact that the last time I had seen Seth, I had blown him off.

I made district chorus senior year... and quit Chamber Singers shortly thereafter.