Can’t go back to adolescence

With Blink-182’s California having been released more than a week ago, I finally found the time to sit down and gather my thoughts about the album as a whole and, God, was it a hard one to figure out.

I distinctly remember finding out Blink-182 was reuniting in 2009. I was sitting in my college dorm room, alongside my best friend, and we had heard Blink was reuniting at the Grammy’s. With the TV on, we waited for the moment they approached the microphone and Mark Hoppus, all smiles, announced “Blink-182 is back”

As I threw my arms up，I nearly died of excitement as a tooth cap unattached itself and lodged itself in my throat causing me to temporary choke and, ultimately, cough up blood. My best friend sat on his bed looking at me in bewilderment. It was enough excitement to distract us from the fact that Tom Delonge never really looked that excited to be apart of the announcement, and as we all know, he never really seemed to be all that excited in being apart of anything band related.

That in itself is an unfair statement because I don’t know Tom nor do I know his intentions, and if nothing else, the reunion gave mid-20somethings like me the chance to finally see their favorite band live. I owe Tom all of the appreciation my body can give.

As the second break-up, and thus second reunion happened, I couldn’t muster the excitement that came with the first. I was so discouraged by Neighborhoods, an album filled with the taste of what could have been, that I was ready to put Blink to bed. I essentially stopped listening to Blink entirely, as their catalogue of nostalgia all felt, in a way, tarnished. It seems silly to say that you need distance from a band’s music because of the members personal lives, but the magic of Blink-182 has always been about the intimate relationships between the fans and the bands members and how those relationships manifested themselves in their music. Without that resonance, it just felt like it was time to move on.

2016.04.27 Bored to Death dropped as Blink 182’s first release without Tom. Now that I’ve come to love the song it’s hard to remember how disappointed I was. I had commented in circles that it’s okay, but nothing worth writing home about. I was further dismissive when watching the new trio interview and I saw Mark attempting to force his own enthusiasm.

Blink-182 was never supposed to be work for these guys. Blink-182 had a message: enjoy life the way you want to enjoy it. The re-tooling of the band was more mid-life crisis than the giddy, naïve excitement of yesteryear. As much as my curiosity still longed for something special, I believed in the bottom of my heart I wouldn’t tune in to listen to another song by this group, with or without Tom.

CALIFORNIA IS BLINK AT THEIR BEST; OMG IT HAPPENED; IT’S AMAZING; BLINK-182 REFUSES TO GROW UP. .

Wait, really? Social media hates everything! But after the album dropped, I tuned into twitter to find that whatever Blink-182 put out, it was getting love from all corners of the internet. I couldn’t resist; I started with the new music video for Bored to Death. A song I had already dismissed now became an instant classic in the Blink repertoire. Song after song I more than accepted the new addition of Matt Skiba and, more importantly, embraced him.

Whatever Mark, Travis, and Matt put together was enough to bring me back to a world I thought I grew out of. However, it wasn’t until I was five songs deep that I got my first taste of San Diego, the song that let me know it was okay to love this new version of Blink-182 and remember why this band was so influential in the first place.

Mark opens the song questioning ‘who we used to be’ in a manner fitting of the humble and ‘grown up’ self-titled release, but it hits so much deeper at 26 than it would have at 13. The song served as an apology to myself for letting myself believe I have to forget the life that made me who I am today. There I was sitting with San Diego on repeat thinking of my own departure from my hometown and, more importantly, those adolescent memories. San Diego took its toll on my conscience more than any Blink-related song since Adam’s Song, but just as Adam’s Song did, San Diego finds a way to be both uplifting and forgiving for being a human, with emotions, lives, and experiences, that sometimes suck and scare us into hiding from our past.

Travis has stated that the door is still open for Tom to come back, and if he does, I’ll be supportive, if not skeptical of the awkwardness that comes with kicking out the band’s newest member or watch them attempt to become a…four piece? There’s no doubt I’d have more belief in them now than I did before. However, If this is the best we get from the, now 40 year old ‘pop-punk Grandfather’s, than it’s already so much more than most Blink fans could have asked for.