Still breathing: How Green Day changed my life
Amid a seemingly endless pandemic, and still reeling from my father's death, Green Day and the 2021 Hella Mega Tour changed my outlook on everything
“I’m still breathing.”
It doesn’t get more life-affirming than that. And with that line, sung among countless others at a rock concert, Green Day changed my life.
It’s hyperbolic as hell to write that, especially now more than three years after I saw the band play one of the best sets I’ve ever seen. If I’m being fair, Weezer and Fall Out Boy deserve some of the credit for changing my life as well, because they laid the groundwork for Green Day’s killer set with ridiculously amazing sets of their own. But at the end of that day, as the Hella Mega Tour’s stop in western Pennsylvania on August 19, 2021, came to a solid and life-affirming conclusion, I walked away a new man with a new vision for what the rest of my life was going to be. And I have Green Day to thank for it.
On September 1, 2024, I saw Green Day again in Pittsburgh, celebrating the 30th anniversary of their “Dookie” release, and the 20th anniversary of “American Idiot.” Both albums were vital foundational parts of my developing love of music, but also span the most consequential parts of my life. To be there with the band, 30 years after they broke out, felt right. It was not the transcendent experience that I had in 2021, but it was still pretty damn amazing, and it inspired me to revisit that concert experience and see if the feelings I felt then still hold up today. And they most definitely do.
I can’t think of a tougher year in my life than 2021. As the U.S. and the world tried to restart life following the first nine months of what would become a seemingly unending Covid-19 pandemic, 2021 started out with the promise of a resumption of “normal” with the release of vaccines. Two quick jabs and you’re good to go! That was the promise, at least; as we know now, even after a significant portion of the population had received a vaccine by July 2021, life hadn’t really turned back to normal yet. People still masked perpetually, crowds were reluctant to gather together again, and vitriol on social media was at an all-time high.
Against this backdrop, I was hospitalized for the first time in my life, a minor bout of diverticulitis that landed me in the hospital on March 17, 2021. At the same time, at a different hospital in my home city, my father was supposed to be completing his recovery from another exacerbation of COPD, a condition caused by decades of cigarette smoking that left him homebound and oxygenated by a machine 24/7. The day after I was admitted to the hospital, my mother informed me that dad’s conditioned worsened and he was opting for end-of-life care. He was dying.
The day after that, March 19, I was slated to leave the hospital, and I asked the attending physician that morning if she’d be kind enough to expedite my discharge since my dad was dying just 23 blocks north of my hospital room. She did that, and I was able to spend the last hours of my dad’s life in his room, while he moved in and out of consciousness as the NCAA men’s basketball tournament played on his TV. He passed away that evening.
The combined effects of the pandemic and my grief trickled into my work life as well, an already stressful experience working in a hospital during a once-in-a-lifetime public-health challenge. I was unhealthy, the heaviest I’d ever been, and the emotional and physical toll of supercommuting to work while also managing a “hybrid elementary school” setup with my daughters started to get the best of me. I’d try to feign emotion or look for support, but who could you turn to with a sympathetic look when everyone’s face is covered and emotionless?
Against the backdrop of all of this, the Hella Mega Tour in August 2021 stood out as an opportunity to enjoy “normal” for the first time in what felt like forever, while also purging so many of the negative emotions that dominated my life (and arguably ALL of our lives) at that time. The show became a bright line between what life had been and what I wanted life to be, and from that moment on, everything changed.
In the days that followed that show, I thought about all the emotions I felt as the bands went through their setlists, and in reflecting on Green Day’s perfect roster of songs, I had a lot of things on my mind that went into what was, at the time, the longest social media post I’d ever written.
I wrote a substantial post the morning after the concert. I told my mostly indifferent Facebook friend list that I was writing it for them, but I really wrote it for myself. I didn’t want the emotion of what I was feeling to be lost to time, and I wanted to capture it as best I could. The excerpts of that post are written below:
“Don’t wanna be an American idiot. One nation controlled by the media. Information age of hysteria. It's calling out to idiot America.”
I left PNC Park, strewn with confetti from Green Day’s show-stopping “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” reflecting on the song that kicked off the band’s set: “American Idiot.”
The album “American Idiot” was released in 2004, at the peak of post-9/11 hysteria regarding terrorism, the Iraq War, outrage over the U.S. combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. And while all of that may have played a significant role inspiring Green Day’s magnum opus album, it’s clear Billy Joe Armstrong and the band had the entire “American experience” of isolation, personal strife, divorce, drug addiction, educational deficiencies, and outright rage on their minds when they composed it. And it’s weirdly prescient to hear these lyrics in 2021, given the “hysteria” in which we currently live.
But those lyrics transfixed me right at the start of the show, and I swear the entire two-hour set transported me to a whole different world. I stop short of calling it a religious experience, but I was hypnotized by the band and what they provided me on a rainy-then-perfect Thursday night in Pittsburgh.
“Now everybody do the propaganda. And sing along to the age of paranoia.”
I needed this concert in the worst way. Life has been stressful, as it is for everyone, but lately the stress has gone beyond my daily adult responsibilities. It’s not just about raising my kids, being a good husband and son, paying the bills, mowing the lawn, and showing up on time for work.
To be honest, and I don’t mean this to be condescending or rude or devalue anyone's very valid feelings and anxieties, but a lot of the angst that many of my friends and family are feeling is bleeding into my life as well, as it is for all of us in our constant collective stream of consciousness on social media. And I don’t think people are bad for believing what they believe; whatever your politics, your beliefs, your social values, I appreciate you all because in the end, you’re good people. You wouldn’t be in my life if you weren’t. And I know lots of you are anxious. I get it. I've worked through this pandemic, in one of the biggest hospitals in the country. I get it.
But this response to the pandemic, as it unfolds daily and weekly, continues to fuel so much anxiety, much of it unnecessary. And while that anxiety manifests itself in positive ways (appreciations for essential workers in the early days of the pandemic, a desire to help others who need it most, contributions to families struggling through unemployment or unexpected medical considerations), a lot of it lately has been divisive, exclusionary, borderline discriminatory, and surprisingly cruel.
“Welcome to a new kind of tension. All across the alienation. Where everything isn't meant to be okay.”
It’s within this context, at this exact moment in my life, that I’m going to list this concert as one of the watershed, transformative moments of my life. I may feel differently when recency bias is lifted from the equation, but it’s how I feel now, so I’m rolling with it! None of the angst and moralizing I see on my news feed daily played any part of the concert experience in Pittsburgh. There had to be 20,000 people there, maybe more, sitting together, listening to music, celebrating these musicians, celebrating life, screaming their lungs out.
The only time the pandemic was mentioned came when Green Day’s Armstrong told people to put down their phones, because we’d been staring into them for most of the past 18 months and that the night wasn’t about that. It was about being together, being alive, basking in the glow of being together and being able to share a singular moment. To reflect on our common humanity. To remember that, sometimes, there’s more to life than what you’re reading on your phone.
Guys, that hit me right in my soul. And from there, I let the music take me away. I sang along at the top of my lungs to songs I knew by heart for most of my life, and it was exactly the cathartic release I needed after so much pent-up frustration and anxiety. And it seemed like every song had a message that resonated with our societal situation today:
“To live and not to breathe. Is to die in tragedy. To run, to run away. To find what you believe. And I leave behind this hurricane of fucking lies.”
“Rainy days and razor blades, I think it's time to pull up the shades. It's wonderful to be alive. Hurricanes and headlines, standing in another line. It's wonderful to be alive. Everything is gonna be alright.”
“Troubled times, you know I cannot lie. I'm off the wagon and I'm hitchin' a ride.”
“I wanna be the minority. I don't need your authority. Down with the moral majority. 'Cause I wanna be the minority.”
And the one that nearly had me in tears:
“'Cause I'm still breathing. 'Cause I'm still breathing on my own. My head's above the rain and roses. Making my way away.”
I can’t qualify with words just how excited the band was to be on stage. Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, Tre Cool, and the other band members were gleeful from start to finish. I don’t think Armstrong stopped smiling or laughing in breaks between songs. He was SO HAPPY to be there. And sure, it could all be stage theatrics, but it *felt* palpable. They felt just as relieved and glad to be a part of the experience as the audience.
And maybe the lesson I’m taking from this is that I need to spend less time on my phone following the misery that’s being foisted on us daily, and continue to focus on the moments that make life worth living. In the past 18 months, the moments that brought me the greatest happiness were trips with my family, amusement park adventures with my kiddos, hugging family and friends when I was the most grief-stricken about my dad’s death, and being at a concert with 20,000 people when every moralizing voice on my social media suggested that participating in that type of event was effectively signing myself over to a guaranteed hospitalization. It was … transformative.
If my life ends tomorrow, I gotta tell ya, I can’t say that I didn’t have the time of my life. I’d argue Green Day feels the same, which is why it’s likely no coincidence that they closed with one of the most life-affirming songs in their catalog:
“So take the photographs and still frames in your mind. Hang it on a shelf in good health and good time. Tattoos of memories and dead skin on trial. For what it's worth, it was worth all the while. It's something unpredictable, but in the end is right. I hope you had the time of your life.”
I want and need to be a better person as a result of this experience, and the path to that, for me, is going to be to mute the voices that continue to fixate on things that cannot be changed, and to deny myself access to the divisive rhetoric that continues to tear apart good people who would otherwise still be friends.
I wish everyone the best of health and happiness and I hope you’ll understand that, in my best interest, I might have to remove your rhetoric from my social media feed. Or I may remove myself again. I don’t know. But I do promise, to the best of my ability, to steer clear of any further divisive discussion.
Finally, I hope you all consider doing the same. If you can’t break your addiction to social media, or if you need it so you don’t feel left out of what’s going on in the lives of others, at least consider limiting your access from time to time. Maybe just once a day. Maybe once every other day. But consider just unplugging for awhile and living. I promise that the release will do you good, will immediately affect your anxiety levels in a positive way, and will allow you to refocus and do what you need to do to keep on living. Because you’re still breathing. Make those breaths count.
I’m posting this today because I’ve mostly held true to my commitment to clearing my life of negative voices and embracing life each and every day. I’ve found a wonderful community of like-minded music lovers on Substack, a site where vitriol likely exists but is substantially easier to tune out and avoid when you surround yourself with good people with common passions. I’ve significantly reduced my footprint on more toxic social media outlets like Facebook, Instagram and X, all of which have their good points, but not good enough to outweigh the mental and emotional negatives that drag me down.
Most of all, I’ve found that music is, and seemingly always will be, the emotional outlet of choice for me. Screaming at the top of my lungs at a concert, jumping into a mosh pit (even at my advanced age), and writing weekly missives about songs I love all provide an emotional release and gateway to enjoy the parts of my life that provide fulfillment: my family, my friends, my work.
Whatever brings you this level of happiness and contentment, I hope you have that outlet in your life. And I hope you’re still breathing, that your head’s above the rain and roses, and that you’re making your way through life.
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Matt- It’s been a minute since I’ve thought of Green Day. So this is a welcome change. I appreciate the reminder. Hope you’re well this week? Cheers, -Thalia