blink 182 - ONE MORE TIME

or, brotherhood: a love song

Originally written in January, 2024.

My son turned five in December and so the other day we brought him to a kindergarten orientation, which was fine and whatever, but on the short drive from our house to the elementary school, a song by Blink-182 came on.

My wife turned up the volume and I was triply struck in the face by this inconsequential nothing of a moment:

1. Blink was back together?

2. My wife likes Blink-182?

3. Is this song about…oh my

Like any boy who was between 10 and 18 at the turn of the millennium, I have always loved Blink-182. However, I also haven’t listened to them since their self-titled album came out in 2003, which feels astonishing that that was that long ago. But here I am, twenty years older, head full of grey, struggling to do 20 pullups a day in my basement when I used to be able to do those all in one go without even thinking too hard about it.

I was bringing my gosh dang son to a kindergarten orientation!

Time eats you. Dead or dreaming.

Anyway, I feel like tackling this song a bit because I feel shocked by it in ways that continue to pile up.

Strangers, from strangers into brothers
From brothers into strangers once again
We saw the whole world
But I couldn't see the meaning
I couldn't even recognize my friends

What immediately gobsmacked me when this song came on and my console told me it was Blink-182 was that I didn’t recognize Tom’s voice. Had I not been driving, I would have googled to see who replaced him in the band. Because I was certain that Tom wasn’t part of the band anymore. But mostly, this voice just didn’t sound like Tom.

Time, I suppose, works upon us all.

The formation of the band began the way many bands do: a couple of kids found each other, found themselves bound to one another through shared passion and a shared language bonedeep. Mark and Tom fell into each other and recorded a few albums before Travis showed up just in time to launch them into the stratosphere where they went on to sell millions of records and tour the entire world for half a decade.

Tensions grew within the band, as is often the case, and Tom left to pursue his interest in UFOs and other such things. He started a new band as well. Eventually, after a few years, he returned and they recorded an album I’ve never even heard of before Tom left again, this time possibly giving up on music entirely.

Older, but nothing's any different
Right now feels the same, I wonder why
I wish they told us, it shouldn't take a sickness
Or airplanes falling out the sky

Mark, I recognized. But this is also where the emotions hit me in the diaphragm.

In 2008, Travis was in a plane crash where everyone died but him and his collaborator Adam Goldstein, who then killed himself a year later. Travis suffered third degree burns all over and required a lot of surgeries.

Travis almost dying was what brought the band back together.

After the next break up, Mark and Tom weren’t on speaking terms, though Tom and Travis had become friends again. Talk of getting the band back together arose here and there, but Mark adamantly denied any possibility.

Travis and Mark picked up a new frontman and recorded a few albums and continued touring as Blink-182.

Then Mark developed leukemia. This brought him and Tom back together, with Mark saying that no one was more supportive than Tom.

Thus and so, the band was back together and, after Mark recovered, they began recording a new album.

This album.

Do you have a brother?

I remember that little room. All three of us packed into a bunk bed that nearly filled the entire space. The air conditioner in the summer kept me awake as it screamed just a few feet away. The floor covered with Legos. The hours I spent in that room by myself, with both of you, where you taught me to read, where I came to love you like another version of myself, and I remember the ways we fought, the blood and the bruises, the screams and the hatred, the tears and the spit and the vicious unsayable, unbelievable words of unfiltered rage that were forgiven before they were even breath in our lungs, before they rushed past our teeth and tongues, and the way you both were a home to me within that home that sometimes suffocated me, that even as a child haunted me, where we became ourselves and each other, where my life and soul was born.

I remember the way depression swallowed you and through the tears of our mother and the rages of our father, I tried to simply be there for you, not knowing how, being only a child. Eight and nine and ten. I tried so hard, with my little body, with my feeble heart, with all the blood and hope and love inside me.

I sat with you while you silently stared at the TV. At Star Trek or Seinfeld or The Simpsons or movies I was too young to see. I didn’t know how to reach you and so I just put myself there, in the way, loving you anyway, even when you told me to go away, even through your days-long silences, through your rages.

I missed you.

Even then. Even always. I missed you while you were there with me and I didn’t know what to do, how to be, how to cross the bridge and reach you, how to be myself without you.

And our other brother, the youngest, stormed in with fists and fury and the two of you fought, but somehow that also seemed the path to you. And I found myself outside of this strange, vicious bond that formed between you.

But I didn’t want your anger and I wasn’t angry at you. At least I didn’t think so.

But I remember being thirteen and fighting you. Punching you. Trying to hurt you.

And then not speaking to you until I was 24.

You were still there, in the house, but I gave you your space and my little brother and I became everything for one another. The only thing. We were only 17 months apart and had spent all of waking memory together.

He was my other half but he never understood me. Even so, my blood was in him and his in mine, and we were bound by more than that blood. By every memory in life shared.

Our two best friends were brothers and so the four of us formed our own little brotherhood. And they felt as much my brothers as my little brother did. For nearly a decade, we spent almost every day together. From the ages of eight until seventeen when I dropped my best friend off at college and then watched him disappear from my life.

When he got married several years later, he didn’t even invite me to the wedding. Not because we had a falling out or anything like that. But he turned away from me and everything we shared and became a new person.

And then his little brother—I don’t know if I can say more about him than what I said here almost three years ago.

At the same time, I was finding new brothers. Friends who have been with me now for twenty years, through much of everything. And it’s funny to me, now, writing this, that I was texting the three of them about this exact Blink-182 song while I’m sitting here writing this sentence.

But I left all of them to go to Ireland and then when I came back things were different between me and my little brother and the distances between us grew and grew and by the time I went to Korea a few years later, I felt as if I didn’t have any brothers. Any family.

It made it easier to go, honestly. Having two halves of my heart gone. One half ripped away in rage and fright. The other left to slowly wither and rot, like a grape on a vine, forgotten.

And there, in Korea, alone, I gave up on parts of myself. And I died, or so it felt, to be reborn in the same body but maybe with a new heart. One ready to be healed and beat again.

I miss you, took time, but I admit it
It still hurts even after all these years
And I know that next time, ain't always gonna happen
I gotta say, "I love you" while we're here

The first time my wife—then my girlfriend—came to visit me in Minnesota, I was living at our parents’ house again. I had only been back from Korea for two months before I went to Europe where I met her. Then I was only back for six weeks before leaving again to go to Europe for three months to try to make it work, to see if my heart had anything left to give.

When she came, I still didn’t have a job and was supposed to already be in Hong Kong at my new job teaching English, but instead I was living on the dwindling remains of the money I made in Korea.

We went to the movie Anna Karenina and so I silenced my phone the way you’re meant to and when we left the theatre, I checked my phone to see a text from my older brother.

He invited me to come over to meet his new girlfriend. He wanted me to bring my new girlfriend.

I started crying. Trying not to.

It had been eleven years. While I was in Korea, he became insanely ill but no one even told me. No one even mentioned that my brother was in the hospital.

I’d never texted my brother before. I didn’t even know how.

Didn’t know even how to be near him.

I told my wife and she told me we should go.

I told him that we’d love to see him. To meet her.

I still don’t know how to be your brother.

We’re closer than we’ve ever been in our lives and I still don’t know how to love you. How to let you love me. You’ve been there since the day I was born.

I don’t know how to tell you that I love you. That I’m glad you’re in my life. That I couldn’t be who I am today without you.

You should know how much you mean to me. I should be able to tell you.

It should be so easy.

Seeing you with my sons—words cannot express what that means to me. To see them love you. To see them know you. To see you love them. To see you know them.

It shouldn’t be so hard to write this. And yet, of all the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written in this stupid fucking newsletter, tracing my heartbreaks, my mental collapses, it’s these fucking sentences that blister me, that burn me, that rip tears out of me, and I wish it wasn’t like this. Wish I could just sit there with you and hug you and tell you that I love you, but I never learned how.

Never learned how to be your brother. Never learned how to be anything but a stranger to so many people, to everyone.

And because of all that’s between us, all these mountains and canyons of time and memory, I find it so much more difficult to find my way to you. To be the person you need. To be the version of a brother that you need.

Because when I see you hurt, it kills me, and I want to be there, want to help you, to hold you up, to carry you, if that’s what you need, but I don’t know how.

Or I do, but the moment I see you, I find myself as an eight year old again, lost, trapped, and not knowing how to step over and past all that’s between us, all that we never learned to be, and to take your hand.

And so I write it here where you’ll likely never see it, knowing it’s not enough. Knowing, again, that I’m failing you. Failing to do something that should be so easy.

Something that is so easy.

Something that is impossibly hard.

One more time (One more time)
One more, one more time (One more time)
One more time
I miss you

You’re my brother.

I love you.

I’m sorry I haven’t been better for you. Haven’t been the brother you needed or need. I’m sorry that the love I hold for you seems locked stomach deep inside me whenever we’re together.

I don’t know how to be with you and I hate that I cannot find the strength to be your brother.

Because I know we both need one another. We have always needed one another, and I look back at all those years that I refused you, that I stayed away, pushed you away, ran in every direction but towards you.

There are so many failures in my life and so many collapses but I often wish I had kept trying to be your brother. That I had had been less proud and angry, less broken by so many things that had nothing to do with you, that the demons and ghosts that have haunted my whole life hadn’t gotten the better of me, hadn’t made me retreat inside myself, in books, in games, in alcohol and hallucinogenic hauntings of my own.

I wish that I had had the strength then to embrace the depression tearing my brain and heart apart and simply embraced you.

Sought solace in you.

Because I know the depression was burning you too.

And maybe we could have found ourselves and healed one another. Maybe we could have been brothers to one another and grown through our pain and terror and become so much more.

To see you suffer tears away at me and I have never told you or shown you the ways I seem to be constantly falling apart since I was ten years old. The way life feels so often like a burden that I’d like to shrug off. That I’d like someone to take from me.

But I look at your family and I see what we could be, what we should be. I look at you with my wife, with my kids, and I know that you’re here for me.

That you are my brother.

That you love me.

I look at your son and feel that he is my own son.

My flesh and blood and bone.

But most of all, I see you.

The way I remember you when memory first burned inside my skull, connecting yesterday to the present.

I see you in his gestures, in his hair, in his smile and his eyes.

I see the way he plays with my son and I feel time collapse.

I see so clearly all it takes.

They teach me how to be a brother. How to love.

And yet.

And yet, here I am, writing this here instead of embracing you, telling you that I love you.

But I do love you.

I will always love you.

You’re my brother. My big brother.

Someday I hope to be your brother in more than words and name.

To be your brother in truth.

And I’m sorry for everyday, past and present and future, that I’m not.

I miss you.

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