second round game
(8) Nirvana, “sappy”
processed
(16) Mineral, “Parking Lot”
95-45
and will play in the sweet 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/14/26.
jennifer gravley: Liner Notes (“Sappy” by nirvana)
If you kill yourself
The voice of your generation died in the cruelest month, your best example of how to save yourself. You assumed you would, one day.
If you fool yourself
You live in the honors dorm, an ivory cinderblock room with a roommate who doesn’t like you. Not one person likes you, including you. The voice of your generation has died inside a jar without breathing holes. Did he ever once think he was happy?
There is a difference between thinking you’re happy and being happy and thinking you’re happy.
You are decades away from a diagnosis in your ivory room in Marks Hall where the heat is an oppressive roommate. You set the fan to going.
If you kill yourself
The voice of your generation reflects back your deepest values—self-loathing, ennui, deep despair. It is for the voice of our generation to tell us what to rail against. It is ourself.
If you fool yourself
The spring of 1994 should’ve been the spring you discovered how beautiful and bright and green spring could be in a land of perpetually watered blooms and good weather, the light a quality artists talk about, but you were in too deep a hole.
If you cut yourself
Your jar is a hole you fall into. You cover yourself with grass.
Your floormate is raped in the night, stereo shattered. No one heard anything. You didn’t hear anything. You, like your floormates, like all good misogynists, question her poor decision making.
So many things shattered—your will, your potential, your floormate’s stereo—and already the earthquake that tilted bookshelves off desks, that shattered Eagles CD cases, that woke you in your extra-long twin.
If you fuck yourself
The voice of your generation says wallow in the shit.
If you fool yourself
In your ivory room, you blast cassettes from your alarm clock, louder than you should, louder than your floormates appreciate. You curl in bed and cry. There is nothing interesting about a person curled in their bed, weeping.
If you fuck yourself
When his death is announced, you are jealous.
If you fool yourself
But the 90s were a different time. You could talk out loud about your desire to die.
Just like the voice of your generation, you’d said out loud to your friends that you wanted to die. You wrote it down, this desire, this murky dream you didn’t know how to make true. You never made plans but thought it would happen. That you wouldn’t live, wouldn’t make it.
You probably felt some kind of happy, sappy, sometimes, but depression messes not only with your ability to feel but also with your memories. You probably laughed sometimes but don’t think of yourself that way, can’t recall a single time.
If you cut yourself
And yet—there is a photo, taken by a floormate and given to you, of you on your extra-long twin, shorts and an extra-large t-shirt, so any time of year, really, writing something (a letter, a bad poem, homework) and smiling in surprise if nothing else.
If you kill yourself
How many variants of “Sappy”? How many models, how many archetypes, of the voice of your generation, of you? How do you separate the voice of your generation from the voice of your mental illness? Is each alternative track equally valid? Does each fill some essential need of some particular audience? Is “Sappy” simply an amalgamation? Are you? Can you substitute, change, the lines to make yourself happy? Does what you repeat, replay, make you who you are?
If you heal yourself
All your memories are suspect. Did your sister teach you to pull the legs off daddy longlegs? Were you repulsed but tried anyway? Did you pull the abdomens off lightning bugs? The 80s were a different time. Did you ever put them in a jar? The summer night air smelled always of grass cuttings, your father home after dark, the rolled-up legs of his overalls shedding clippings.
There was no dividing line like a divorce. There was simply a slide or maybe a sudden onset, but memory blurs. There is a before time, so little you barely remember, memories that burst with the brightness of a camera flash. The fair outside Head Start, the summer sun burning. The polaroid of your blonde bowl cut in kindergarten. There’s a sense of being happy, of before. But even then there’s the Saturdays you wouldn’t get out of bed to watch cartoons. There’s you, eight, staying up and watching sitcoms about alcoholics in the quiet still dark of the living room without anyone else in it.
If you kill yourself
What does it mean to be the voice of your generation? How much did it weigh? What must it be like to never get old, to never have to see the teenagers who raged with you turn puffy and saggy and sick at heart to have done nothing?
If you save yourself
In the end, the choice to live wasn’t a choice at all. You just kept waking up.
If you cut yourself
For years and years and decades, you wanted to die when your life sucked, and you wanted to die when your life was undeniably beautiful. You felt the same at heart, sick without a fever, just a way of existing.
If you fuck yourself
A week of celebrity suicides—a handbag designer, a chef—begins you being more honest with your therapist. You were afraid of being hospitalized, but you also badly wanted it. The rest, the break. You imagined nothing being expected of you. You had a fantasy it’d be you in bed all the time. You had no idea how these things worked. You didn’t want to get better. You just wanted to be able to sink into your depression further without having to worry about the people around you, work, bills, any commitment to the world or the people in it. You wanted to wallow until you died, which you felt you would.
If you fuck yourself
You never took yourself as seriously as when your therapist said if you didn’t do something, you were going to kill yourself. Somehow it was different being told as a premonition, as a promise, than it did when you thought of dying and it filled you with relief.
If you cut yourself
Every battle, you’re only fighting yourself. You’re fighting only yourself. Order and precision matter—all you have are words, the same source material as your thoughts.
If you save yourself
Press fast-forward and years later, the correct, the magic, pills stop your bad thoughts like a light switch flipped. It turns out that everything you thought was you was just a disorder. In the space where you hated yourself, there is only space. The pills inflate your body, wreck your blood sugar, hijack your heart rate, but you don’t care. You’ll take the space over the hole, the jar. It’s white space in your head, that time between chorus and chorus where the guitar plays. You don’t know what to do with yourself.
If you fuck yourself
Sometimes you think what gives you the right to write when so many people dream of hurting themselves, when so many people do. You’re just another dreamer pumped with good drugs.
If you kill yourself
You, (like) the voice of your generation, never thought you’d be happy.
It is for the voice of our generation to tell us now to live, what to hope for and rail against.
It is himself.
If you save yourself
Build a memorial to the voice of your generation through your midlife, medicated and screeching. Line the ground, the glass bottom, with grass from an untended graveyard which struggles.
If you heal yourself
And once you get well, you have to go on living by living for the first time. You have to go on living without many people, rock stars and friends and childhood bullies and your mother and your father.
There is only so much you can retrieve from the past. Less than there is nostalgia for. You are nostalgic for the girl who was depressed and anxious and washing her hands too much, the girl who sat on the floor of the laundry room. You didn’t know your brain was wired wrong—differently—you didn’t know that anyone or anything could help you.
You didn’t think you could be happy.
If you save yourself
The work of midlife is to redefine saving yourself, since you lived. You take your replacement hormones and go to therapy on your work computer. You say things like we’ll get through this and all we can do is our best, even though you have never thought you’d get through anything or that your best was good enough for anyone, including you.
Somehow, you’re fifty. You’ve saved yourself for decades, even when you didn’t mean to. So many things in life aren’t on purpose. So much craft is instinctual, is punishing, is pushing its way through you. You are perpetually surprised by how old you’ve become. You never thought you’d.
If you fuck yourself
The voice of your generation has been dead since adolescence. Since the ivory room of Marks Hall, the basement laundry room. Did his death mean the end of childhood? You couldn’t know this death meant death would keep coming for you, person after person after person, while you kept living.
If you kill yourself
The voice of your generation speaks from scattered ashes, from scratched technology, from the past. The voice of your generation still speaks to you from scattered ashes. The past is a skein overlaying every moment you move through.
It would be a mistake to say
Conclusion came to you
Jennifer Gravley is an assistant director at an academic library during the day (and occasional evenings and weekends). At night, she reads and writes and eats snacks and sleeps, the usual stuff. She has recently acquired a "Maman" pin and hopes to scare people with it.
brittney uecker on mineral’s “parking lot”
Mineral - Parking Lot. Last song, last show ever @ Best Friends Forever
There’s a moment just before Mineral’s final—like, final final—performance of “Parking Lot” at the Best Friends Forever Fest in Las Vegas in October 2025 where lead singer Chris Simpson mumbles something barely intelligible, possibly something about a whale, before laughing it off. “This song’s about being happy,” he says before launching the song’s initial lamenting notes, the last time they will ever be played on stage. Behind him, the band’s name is projected in huge bright green letters against the backdrop of the enormous mainstage, a crowd of thousands of elder emo apologists screaming in anticipation. The lead up to this iconic riff and all the finality it holds is expected, the same kind of prepared sadness one feels when you have to put your dog down or sign divorce papers—you know it’s coming, and you can brace yourself for the grief. But on the surface, right here on the stage as it’s happening, the dissolution of Mineral—for the second time around—is smooth. It has the calm of muscle memory, of something engrained. It’s an undoubtedly loaded moment, as the band looks out over all they’ve done, all they’ve gathered in their short yet impactful career, but perhaps it’s just another iteration, another “Parking Lot” closing out the show.
Mineral "Parking Lot" @ Knights of Columbus Hall. Orlando FL 9/13/1997
“This wouldn’t be a Mineral concert if we didn’t end it with ‘Parking Lot’,” Simpson tells an audience twenty-eight years earlier at a show at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Orlando. It’s September 1997. The video is grainy and discolored, the fluorescent overhead lights reflecting harshly off of Simpson’s blond, middle-parted hair. The group of kids encircling the drumset is focused and still. It’s hard at first to tell who is the band, where the calm, whispering croon is emanating from when the song begins, but eventually the environment settles and the source reveals itself in Simpson. He’s tall and gangly, craning down over a mic stand he refuses to raise, his eyes downcast, his voice warbly and unsure, almost Oberst-esque. He turns away from the direct gaze of the crowd at every opportunity, maintaining his calm murmur even after the breakdown around ninety seconds into the song, after the agonizing sob of Scott McCarver’s guitar takes over and an overwhelm of feedback envelopes the room like a weighted blanket. Even after this energy is injected into the song, swallowing the open rafters and janky ceiling fan and droplets of sweat dripping down the concrete walls, the band remains molasses-y slow and deliberate, the crowd giving up little more than a head bob in response. The guitars are off-tune and the tempo is all over the place, as if they haven’t really decided how they want to play this song, as if the distant punk influence can’t help but eke through.
This tableau repeats itself in every tinny, blurred video of Mineral you can dredge up from the depths of YouTube, from basement shows and DIY festivals and VFW halls, these holy crystalized performances from the mid-90s. In this way, it’s a sacred relic—you don’t see a cell phone held aloft or skinny jeans or copious amounts of eyeliner, just kids completely present and dressed for the discomfort of a sweaty basement. This was back when emo was purely linguistic, a truncation of the word ‘emotional’, characterized by little more than bleary-eyed despondency and an anguish so potent it transcended image and theatrics.
When emo emerged in the mid-eighties as an outgrowth of DC and California hardcore punk, it was a reaction to the growing aggression within these scenes. While hardcore, punk, and various combinations of the two targeted the sources of its listeners’ despair—politics, bigotry, societal conformity, etc. —, emo zeroed in on the despair itself. Lyrically, it was introspective, confessional, and deeply personal. It dealt heavily with relationships, particularly the thwarted and dissolving, and subsequently skewed toward the emotional. Musically, emo shifted away from the hard, fast spewing of punk toward more melodic elements that let the content of the lyrics shine through, including longer song structures and dynamic shifts in sound, volume, and pace. As emo spread inward from the coasts, it continued to soften, moving further from its punk roots of self-righteous violence and activist anger towards themes of breaking up, growing up, and feeling it all.
As the overall genre evolved over several decades into 2nd, 3rd, and some would argue 4th waves, some bands embraced the label while many, including Mineral, eschewed it, finding the categorization limiting and derogatory. Admittedly, seeing what the term ‘emo’ would come to encompass and be associated with in the later years, perhaps this rejection was more prophetic than anything. Emo continued to splinter and speciate, drawing on not just musical influences as varied as pop, indie, prog rock, and metal, but cultural. The mass migration of music and society in general to the internet, namely social media, turned the lens (literally) toward the aesthetic. Emo is far from the only subculture, let alone musical genre, to atrophy within the grips of commercialization—cue Hot Topic, Warped Tour, and Emo Nite—but such a hard fall, a blatant squandering of potential, fucking hurts. Bastardization seems like a fitting term.
But if anything about emo’s birth can be considered intentional, its initial intention was to expose internal pain to external light, to create a space for expressing deep, personal emotions and witnessing the reality and universality of heartache. While Mineral’s short-lived, two-breakup career was arguably overshadowed by those of contemporaries like Jimmy Eat World, Sunny Day Real Estate, the Promise Ring, and American Football, they were subtle masters of the craft. What sets Mineral apart lyrically and thematically is that their expression of emotional pain is always accompanied by aspiration. Their biggest release, 1997’s The Power of Failing, as well as “Parking Lot” specifically, bypass direct focus on love and grapple with other inherently vulnerable themes including crises of faith, embrace of personal imperfection, the search for identity, and the delicate intertwining of hope and despair. There’s no wallowing for wallowing’s sake. These songs aren’t just “about being happy.” They are about getting happy.
*
Max and I had a tumultuous, isolated relationship—tumultuous in the way it exploded my marriage, my identity, and my life, in the desperation and anguish of our push-pull, guilt-filled dynamic; isolated in the fact that it was a secret. As my marriage was shriveling into nothing in the face of multiple miscarriages, my husband’s alcoholism, and our shared despondency, I craved attention, however hollow and immediate, and found it in Max.
We couldn’t have been more unalike. Though he was only three years younger than me, there was a lifetime of experience separating us. I was a mother, a wife, a homeowner. I had a career, a Master’s degree, a car, health insurance, an overwhelming amount of responsibility, all things he did not have. He was unattached and unburdened, working part-time at a grocery store and skating through life without direction or responsibility, which was what drew me to him, why I attached myself like a barnacle. I was envious of his apparent freedom, tantalized by the prospect of giving it all up in order to feel an ounce of relief from the pressure of fulfilling all the roles I was required to fill. “I shouldn’t be attracted to this,” I wrote in my journal. “He’s inconsistent, unreliable, describes himself as chaotic. But I am so inexplicably drawn to the mess of him, to the tiny bit of panic I get when I see the way he lives.”
What began as an excruciating crush escalated into a feverish, clandestine affair, and as my marriage inevitably ended, it became a numbed-out path of self-torture. Things would eventually settle down, and as I began to reassemble my life on the other side of a divorce, Max and I would salvage some sort of tenuous friendship, but it never felt normal, despite our best efforts. I could only compartmentalize so far. Maybe that’s why we don’t speak any more.
*
The lyrics of “Parking Lot” have nothing to do with a parking lot. The title pays homage only to the song’s provenance—allegedly, the opening riff came to McCarver as a flash of divine, random inspiration while driving, prompting him to pull over in a nearby parking lot to capture it. Yet, after the fact, a parking lot seems like the most fitting setting for this song, for feeling devoid of belonging. A parking lot is a holding pen, a place that inherently lacks permanency. You aren’t meant to be there for long. It’s where you go when you can’t go anywhere else, when there is nowhere you can call home. A parking lot is liminal, and in that fragile state, it makes it a breeding ground for moments of vulnerability.
Each section of the song is a movement, a phase in a journey, such that there is undeniable forward motion, both lyrically and musically. The song begins with a quiet acknowledgment of one’s current pain, stated plainly. There is a recognition of hopelessness, of rock bottom, but it isn’t dramatic. It’s stated as an honest fact, so universal that the source doesn’t even have to be named:
I wouldn’t mind if you took me in my sleep tonight
I wouldn’t even put up a fight
I wouldn’t care if you took it all away today
I’m sure I wouldn’t even miss the pain.
This inevitability is further emphasized in the next verse, where the voice makes the massive, cosmic discovery that life is pain and admits their own insignificance in the grand scheme of it all. Rather than burdening themselves with the realization of this immateriality, there’s a sense of relief in this realization, in its humanizing beauty:
But I know I’ve got to live my life
And roll around on the ground and feel the strife
And realize along the way that I’m nothing more
Than a grain of salt in the salt of the earth
And everything is grace.
What strings these two sections together, what carries us from the fact of life’s pain to the relief of one’s lowly human insignificance, is the most devastating guitar riff I’ve ever heard. When McCarver’s guitar barrels into this song, it’s as if his guitar is not just crying, but keening, moaning in absolute anguish. It’s almost hard to listen to as it howls, slow and grief-stricken. Better than the lyrics, better than Simpson’s voice, that single guitar riff rips you right into the emotional crevasse that this song insists that you be in. How can something that sounds so impossibly sad possibly be about happiness?
From there, the tempo picks up just slightly, the guitar takes a breather, and Simpson’s voice gathers strength as the lyrics shift from the recognition of life’s inevitable suffering to actively coaxing that suffering to manifest:
So come on with the darkness
Come on with the fear
Cause I’ve got to start somewhere
And it might as well be here.
It is both humble and cocky, taunting the fates while also acknowledging, once again, one’s current location at rock bottom, recognizing that the only way to go is up. The only way to move is to explode. There is vulnerability in this admission, very “God sees your plans and laughs”, but also confidence. This is further emphasized in the closing lyrics:
When I’m finally naked and standing in the sunlight
I’ll look back at all of this selfishness and foolish pride
And laugh at myself
Laugh at myself
Laugh at myself
Laugh at myself
Laugh at myself.
We are left on that lasting final image, of a person stripped and submitting, laughing in a manner that I can only picture as maniacal. From the keening devastation we met three minutes ago to the stark, bared soul open to whatever the world is going to bring, this song comes full circle. It’s just the start of something, but it feels complete.
*
We had our fair share of parking lots, Max and I. When you have nowhere to go, no place in which you can legitimately be together, you find yourself in a parking lot. We met in parking lots to hook up, to hide, sometimes just to talk. From behind a cracked windshield, in the jagged shadows cast by floodlights, looking at the yellow slashes on the pavement, I could forget for just a moment about the world outside, about my real life. The setting lent a sort of backwards permissibility: if we only existed in this liminal, not-real place, it could be okay.
Early on, when my paranoia and guilt hadn’t yet given way to despondency and numbness, I met him one afternoon in the parking lot of the grocery store where he worked. Sitting in my car looking at the loading dock, I tried to explain the stakes of this mess we were getting ourselves into, how this could completely destroy me—my marriage, my reputation, my self-worth. I wasn’t sure if I was trying to tell him all the reasons why we should stop or all the reasons why we needed to be careful.
“This could ruin me, you know. If anyone finds out, I’ll lose everything.” He was single, fledgling, with little more responsibility than keeping himself alive. I was the one with everything to lose.
“It’s going to be okay, right?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, full of presumption and naivete. “Of course it is.”
The next year was a blur, punctuated with moments of agonizing pain before there could be moments of joy, and through it all, Max faded away. My husband and I divorced, split our life in half, and I reassembled the pieces into a Frankenstein-ed semblance of something new. I met someone else and fell in love. I dreamed up a scheme to leave the shithole town where my life had entirely imploded and put the pieces into place—new relationship, new career, new home, new life. The painful interim between these chapters would remain just that—an interim. Liminal. A parking lot.
A few weeks before I moved away, I met Max for a drink and a final goodbye. I had been doing this with many friends in the lead-up to leaving—meeting up for the last time, pretending that I was going to miss any part of this place, offering hollow assurances that I would keep in touch. Our conversation was pleasant, but felt forced. Without the scarcity and feverish risk that our interactions used to hold, it now just felt awkward. I let myself disassociate from the man sitting across from me, from someone who used to have me in an emotional chokehold but was nothing more than another reminder of a chapter that was over, as I drank cheap beer and watched the old cowboys at the bar playing pool.
In the parking lot as we parted ways for the final time, we both said “I’ll miss you” with the best of intentions, the benefit of the doubt. In just a second, I’d finally be able to breathe. I didn’t feel sad.
As we parted, he moved forward to kiss me. There was a disbelieving moment where I almost let it happen, where I forgot who he was and my body fell into the old pattern of his affection like it was something I should be doing. Before I snapped back to reality and realized that it wasn’t, that this, him, was not the life I want, I was knocked into a swimmy, liminal dimension between the things I used to want and no longer did, between the past and present. By the time I paddled to the surface, I was pushing him away, shoving my hands in my pockets to tether myself back to earth and walking in the other direction.
“You can’t fucking do that, you know,” I turned to scream across the empty parking lot between us. “You can’t do that anymore.”
This parking lot was a rock bottom for both of us, a bottom from which we would follow opposing trajectories: him towards stagnancy and wheelspinning, and me towards resilience and rebuilding. In the background, deep in my mind’s ear, I could hear Chris Simpson’s begging wail:
So come on with the darkness
Come on with the fear
Cause I’ve got to start somewhere
And it might as well be here.
There is so much fragility in this moment, so much potential for destruction. It could have so easily gone the other way—I could have leaned in, accepted this moment that my memory wanted, and destroyed everything I had going for me, just like I had before. It’s frightening to consider.
I wonder where he went from here, if this moment was as significant in the trajectory of his life as it was in mine, if this parking lot moment also lodged itself into his memory.
I never saw him again.
*
As is expected in the throes of all-encompassing infatuation, several songs felt relevant during this time and have, for better or worse, inextricably bound themselves to it —“Your Graduation” by Modern Baseball, “Constant Headache” by Joyce Manor, “Stockholm Syndrome” by blink-182, and obviously, “Parking Lot”. They are so potently attached that, years later, it still hurts. Whenever the looping opening riffs of any of these songs strike, a knot forms in my stomach. I am instantly thrown back into the well of guilt and desperation, desire and despondency, that colored the most difficult era of my life. It’s the lyrics only in part—I swear this has gotta be the hundredth time I’ve thought of you tonight from “Your Graduation”, I never ever felt so cool disguised in your sheets from “Constant Headache”, I’m sick with apprehension, I’m crippled from exhaustion from “Stockholm Syndrome”. What feels significant is the overwhelming melancholy of the music itself, the shrieking guitars, both feverish and syrupy, the desperate, relentlessness of the drums, the off-tune, beaten-down voices of Bren and Barry and Mark. It’s meant to rip the heart right out of you, and it does. I’ve tried to resurrect these songs years later, tried to provide corrective experiences that can make them listenable again, yet there still exists that slightly pleasurable pain of poignancy, of nostalgia, that makes me feel like a walking advertisement for whatever the fuck emo is.
“Parking Lot” is the exception, because while those songs were about him, about being stagnant in despair, “Parking Lot” is about movement, about despair’s inevitably intertwining with hope.
*
Nearly a year after that last parking lot incident, my phone rang on a Sunday morning, a number I didn’t recognize. I’d normally ignore this kind of call, but something that day compelled me to pick up. On the other line was Max, his number long since deleted. I hadn’t heard his voice, seen his face, or allowed more than a fleeting thought of him to graze my mind since our last moment in the bar parking lot, and to map his existence onto my current experience was a mindfuck.
His voice was shaky and cracking, like he’d been crying. “I didn’t know who to call,” he said. He told me he was sitting in the parking lot behind the grocery store, chain smoking cigarettes and clattering into another parking lot rock bottom. For whatever reason, he had woken up that Sunday morning and taken stock of his life—working the same dead-end job, sleeping on an air mattress in his parents basement, broke, alone, directionless—and saw it all in stark realism for the first time. The aimlessness that had drawn me to him in the first place, that I had once seen as freedom, had revealed itself to be emptiness.
“I don’t even know who I am any more,” he told me. “I need to get the fuck out of this town.”
It was an experience I was acutely familiar with, exactly what I had been feeling when we’d met. I’d felt a complete lack of identity, lost in a place I didn’t want to be, and trapped in the life I’d built. I knew what it was like to feel like I had no options, that I couldn’t escape unless I blew it all up. It was why I had chosen the explosion of him. It was only from the rubble of a shattered life that I could begin to build a new one. Maybe it had to be the same for Max.
He talked of moving to California, of selling his things and leaving everyone behind, of starting from scratch. He had a history of drug use in the past, and I hoped that a blank slate wouldn’t be a breeding ground for that kind of self-destruction, but I understood its allure. I had done the same—left my marriage, sacrificed half my life with my kids, quit my job, moved away, and started from scratch. It was hard as hell, and from the bottom of the well I could barely see a hint of light, but it had been worth it. I was reconstructing happiness. I could only hope the same for him.
Again, “Parking Lot” howled in the background of my mind:
But I know I've got to live my life
And roll around on the ground and feel the strife…
'Cause I've got to start somewhere
And it might as well be here.
“You are good,” I assured him. “You are going to do great things. You are going to get the fuck out of that town and you are going to be okay.”
“Do you really believe that?” he asked me.
When I'm finally naked and standing in the sunlight
I'll look back at all of this selfishness and foolish pride
Laugh at myself.
I never talked to him again.
*
When Chris Simpson said that “Parking Lot” is a “song about being happy”, he didn’t mean the state of happiness. This song isn’t an ode or a glorification of a feeling, nor is it a lamentation over a lack of it. It’s not about being happy—it’s about the path to getting happy. It’s about admitting that while you aren’t happy now, you’re going to be, and that without this distinction, it’s not worth talking about in the first place. It’s not static. “Parking Lot” witnesses an entire journey. Perhaps that makes “Parking Lot” quintessentially emo in its purest sense, or maybe that’s what makes it categorically something else.
*
With nothing to go on, no clues or communication upon which to brace my assumptions, I imagine what Max’s life might look like now. What happened to him after all those parking lots, after that last phone call, after I promised him that he would eventually be okay? Because despite all the shame laced through my memories of our relationship, despite all the pain it wrought, I do want him to be okay.
Did he go to California like he mentioned, start completely over from nothing? Is he still in that small town doing the same shit he’s always done, still directionless, still perpetually adrift? Something brighter? Something unimaginably worse? Did he find himself in more parking lots, in more liminal meanwhiles, killing the time, putting off the inevitable, or is he standing in the sunlight, looking back at all, and laughing, laughing, laughing at himself?
Brittney Uecker is a writer, mother, and school librarian living in central Montana. Her work has been published by Pithead Chapel, Short Story, Long, Taco Bell Quarterly, and others and is a Best of the Net nominee. She is a Scorpio sun, Cancer moon, and her favorite Dewey Decimal number is 597.96 (snakes).