Counting Crows - Round Here

Twenty years ago this summer, this single was in heavy rotation on MTV - yeah, back when they played music videos.

Twenty years ago I had memorized the lyrics to this song and sang it in the shower. Daily. Loud.

So what was up with me?



My first cat, who adopted me and taught me love and loyalty, passed away suddenly. The Vet said I did real good by her, but she had FIV and wasn't meant to last in this world.

My relationship with my girlfriend, with whom I shared a rented house in the Sierra Nevada foothills, was drifting away from me. She was flakey; I was mercurial. Well matched in the physical chemistry department, but while that's necessary, after a while it's not sufficient.

I traveled east for my college roommate's wedding, returning in the middle of the night to find the apartment listings on the kitchen counter, with several circled. She moved out within a month. Booty call lasted well into November - yeah, one of those. I didn't mind.

So - alone in a house with a box of cat ashes, an empty bed from the second lingering but failed relationship in as many years, not even counting the divorce from the starter wife back in the east coast the prior year...

At the job I had moved across the country for, I had impressed some and pissed of many more - out of concern for "integrity" which many around me read - mostly correctly - as a prickly sensitivity. I had a couple of shipping products, a decent stack of US patents, a nice stash of lucrative stock options - and no real clear future. Again.

I was thirty one; too old for bitter Holden Caulfield naiveté and too young for the defeated cynicism of middle age.

And as I realized my former lives were dying, in a way, and my former selves with them, I had to stop seeing my life as one damn thing after another, that life had choices - that it demanded choices, in fact, and I needed to start making some, and being responsible for them.

By the next spring, I had. That's another story, for another time, maybe never. But for August, and everything after that year, this some was pretty much how I felt.

Twenty years ago. What was up with you?