Winter was hard last week. Easy, but hard. Magnolia had only three days of school thanks to Winter Storm Izzy, which lingered long enough into MLK Day for Hudson to call off Tuesday before we went to bed Monday night. Some parents hate snow days because they hate having their children around, but we love our kid’s company and celebrated the news by turning off the alarm, cracking open beers and sitting down to a family game of Scrabble at 9pm. Still, the week was fatiguing: Two days of snow removal, including a trip to the roof to push a foot of wet slop off the sun room. Temperatures dwindling to single digits by Friday evening. Too many spreadsheets and not enough sunlight. I tried to brighten our world through the warmth of the stereo, but Latin jazz was not the prescription lamp I had hoped it would be. So I went in the opposite direction, toward dreary but reliable sonic pills, though I was careful not to turn Echo and the Bunnymen into another winter rabbit hole. Then again, I did have the first Interpol record on repeat for several days.

Turn On the Bright Lights, Interpol’s debut album, turned 19 years old last year. It was released on August 20, 2002 at the peak of the early-aughts post-punk revival, and it’s possible I was in New York City on street date – that, or I had just arrived back in Northeast Ohio after taking a Greyhound from the Port Authority Bus Terminal to downtown Cleveland, where my dad picked me up and drove me back to my childhood home to face real life for the first time since leaving the country that May. It was only this past week that I learned, to my surprise, that Turn On the Bright Lights was a summer release; I’ve listened to the album in the depths of winter and the dripping dog-day heat, and regardless of season, it always sounds like drifting snow on a desolate urban street. For nearly two decades, I was convinced the album came out in November. That’s a testament to how much I lost touch with music in 2002. For the first time since I was 14, it just wasn’t on my radar. I spent the first four months of the year selling off most of my collection on eBay to fund back-to-back trips to Nova Scotia and Europe in the spring and summer. Determined to make the trips happen, I purposely ignored the new release calendar; buying a record would have been a breach of contract, a kink in the armor of my newfound resolve.

Andrew introduced me to Interpol sometime near the end of 2002, a few months after we took over my brother’s rental home on Collinwood Avenue in Akron’s North Hill neighborhood. Andrew was one of my two travel companions in Europe and the one who had proposed the trip to Kyle and me in late-2001. Andrew had a three-month graphic design internship lined up in Zurich, and he pitched the idea of backpacking through Europe on the backend. He would already be there, it was Kyle’s last summer before med school went year-round and I – well, I was only working at a newspaper in the middle of nowhere New Hampshire and could knock off for a couple of months, right? It wasn’t that easy. At least, that’s what I told myself (and Andrew) as I rattled off multiple reasons why I couldn’t go (mostly related to work and money), and coming from an unattached 24-year-old with no one to answer to, not even a faceless creditor, none of my excuses were even remotely convincing. And Andrew, mercifully, called me out on it in the best fuck-you letter I’ve even received. Within 24 hours of reading his unmerciful takedown, I was on eBay listing the first of some 500 CDs and LPs.

The letter, and subsequent trip, could not have been better timed. I had been struggling with anxiety for well over a year and finally sought professional help right before Andrew’s letter showed up in the mail. I felt like I was growing old before my time. I was working up to 55 hours a week on an entry-level community newspaper salary, and I could feel my nerves fraying. I was tired, lonely and a little freaked out by the adult life ahead of me, and as the panic attacks and restless nights mounted, I wondered if maybe I wasn’t equipped for newspaper work, or any work at all, or making it on my own. A prescription for a little blue pill helped me sort it out while I spent the solitary mountain winter sorting through my CDs and records to see what they were going for on eBay, listing the treasures one-by-one and turning the proceeds into packable gear, a plane ticket to London and pocket money for my adventures. I could write volumes about the bright, spectral bursts of time standing still and the patient, gradual maturation I experienced in 2002, but the Reader’s Digest condensed version goes like this: By the end of that life-altering year, I finally felt like I had stepped into my skin. In 12 months, I made peace with my headspace, met my eventual wife, quit my first newspaper job, took a mind-blowing trip with my two best friends and reset my course for an adult world I finally felt ready to inhabit, hands firmly on the wheel for the first time ever.

But then there was Akron, and reentry. I wouldn’t say I landed with a thud, but it wasn’t graceful either. Collinwood was a hasty decision. After a few days in Cuyahoga Falls, back on 14th Street with my parents like I had never left home in the first place, it was clear to me that I needed my own space. That’s no slight against Mom and Dad; living with them was easier than some roommates I’ve had, but I was at a strange crossroads and needed to sort out my shit without them looking on like zookeepers. Andrew was at his own odd juncture. He was staying with his aunt and uncle in Bath, a half-hour from Kent State and months away from a finished thesis. In miles and minutes, Collinwood wasn’t much closer to campus, but as a cosmic crash pad for the task at hand, it was an upgrade over a relative’s mansion in West Akron. Neither of us had any money. My eBay nest egg ran out in New York, where I spent a week visiting friends after landing back in the States, and I used one of those credit card loan checks to pay Travis the first month’s rent. I’m not sure how Andrew paid his half, but somehow he made it happen, too.

Andrew and I have been friends since we were 6, but up until Collinwood we had never lived together. We moved in after Labor Day on a month-to-month handshake lease with no end game in sight; even if he completed the thesis, Andrew still had no idea what would happen next, and I had even less long-term focus – as in, none. I spent the fall writing bad poetry I thought was good and applying for dozens of jobs good and bad. In three months, I got zero callbacks – not even the lumber yard wanted me. Apparently, we had returned to Ohio during a post-9/11 downturn and there wasn’t much happening on the work front. Finally, a week before Christmas, two days after I had applied and qualified for unemployment, I got a 20-hour gig at a local newspaper typing obituaries and engagement announcements into a computer for 10 bucks an hour. The job was 20 minutes away and I had to wear a necktie, but it was something. I tried wearing a nice turtleneck sweater with my discount slacks until my editor called me out on the missing necktie. I begrudgingly complied – I had rent to pay and a plane ticket to buy to visit Erica in New Hampshire in February. The tie was as close to an emotional investment as I made during my brief tenure at the Record-Courier. I kept my head down, did my work and clocked out on the dot every day. My coworkers didn’t seem to know what to do with me, and vice versa. The few times I did open my mouth, my humor fell flat and they only eyed me and my perpetually baggy eyes with more suspicion. Most of them went out together for lunch every day while I sat at my desk eating the same sad peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the same sad necktie. I did not make any friends, even by accident. It was the perfect arrangement for where my head was at.

Andrew and I ended up staying on Collinwood long enough to see three seasons turn before life turned us both in new directions, but for as little as we had to do and as little as we left the house, it felt like we packed three years of living into that old bungalow, and most of it centered around a dining room table where we kept strange inebriated hours creating, conversing and playing countless games of Yahtzee and Scrabble under the constant din of the stereo. I don’t remember the exact date Turn On the Bright Lights entered the house, but listening to it now, it’s synonymous with the uncompromising glare of winter on Collinwood. The combination of little money, low job prospects and a lack of direction created a crippling, quiet intensity within me, a pent-up urgency on the constant verge of implosion. And the house was cold. So fucking cold. And our gaunt, malnourished frames did us no favors. Upon moving in, Andrew had claimed the upstairs bedroom – more of an attic, really, and poorly insulated as such – and come winter he took to wearing multiple layers of clothing to bed. It didn’t seem to make much difference. When Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm was released in 2005, Andrew messaged me after hearing the opening track “Like Eating Glass” and said it sounded liked Collinwood. That should tell you something about the vibe. There’s a certain romance to living this way when you’re young, but looking back, the stakes weren’t as high as we thought they were – a 30-second phone call and I could have moved back in with my parents, no questions asked. Andrew would have found somewhere to land, too, and if he didn’t, my parents would have taken him in with me. We were privileged kids in that respect, always having somewhere to land. We still do. Nonetheless, the cold was real, the hunger was real, the lack of money was real, and “Like Eating Glass” condenses it all into four very real minutes of modern rock desperation. Listening to Turn On the Bright Lights has the same emotional effect. It’s a bleak, blurry-eyed, intense, inscrutable record that wallows in self-inflicted despair. There is hunger and wine, lust and loneliness. Multiple songs reference snow. After hitting the quarter-century mark and suddenly feeling not-young, hearing a man of my age singing about seeing the world anew from a “poor and aging” vantage point really hit home on Collinwood. It’s funny how I feel younger listening to “Obstacle 1” at 44 than I did at 25. Dylan has a song about that.

Everything – past, present and future – is now filtered through the context of the pandemic; rarely can I view the world, watch a movie or hear a song free of its lens. I recently found a cassette of Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man at an indoor flea market, and when Leonard croons the line, “If you want another kind of love, I’ll wear a mask for you,” it’s impossible not to think of COVID-19. He’s not singing about N95s, of course, but in spite of myself, that’s where the mind goes, and my winter mind keeps running Collinwood through the pandemic lens, too. It was nearly half a lifetime ago, but sitting here now I’m only 17 miles and 26 minutes away from those four steps up to the front porch. Yet, I may as well be living on another planet – though aren’t we all at the moment? My life in Hudson, by choice, is one of almost embarrassing comfort and security. Collinwood, in contrast, while rich with existential epiphanies and certain sordid charms, was an unstable way station, a social science experiment on the self, a willful swallowing of the red and the blue pill, and rarely has my life been so beautiful and raw to the bone at the same time. A few years removed from those nine months in North Hill, Andrew referred to Collinwood as boot camp for the rest of his life, but even in our haziest shade of winter, never could we have envisioned this pandemic. The circumstances are much different, of course, but my current patterns of movement and nagging mental discomforts are eerily similar to those I experienced on Collinwood, and the truth is, I wouldn’t be this good at self-isolation had I not forced myself into it 19 years ago, and in fact, I’m much better at it. Then again, I was so much colder then. I’m warmer than that now.

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