We played at Kenyon last night and I was able to speak to my best friend Julia, who I met at Barnard 9 years ago, on the phone as we drove through Ohio hills and farmland to get to the remote college. Walking into the beautiful, well-equipped, farmhouse-turned-student music venue, I saw two girly-pops who reminded me of Julia and me many years ago – colored tights and cute dresses, one even had cropped hair like Julia used to have – and it was their birthday party and they told me after the set their party was partygirl themed and they shaved the one diva’s hair in a field before coming to the venue and they moshed all night in heels and right, right, right: “she and I are 20 and smart and our lives a barrage of ‘you could be next’” but there’s no barrage exactly right now, no, no, no not tonight.

There’s hope in a college band covering the Clash and there’s hope in tears from a young woman moved. There’s hope in a dive bar bartender creating Amaro cocktails because she wants to despite her boss’s protestations and there’s hope in a bathroom that stocks tampons and Naloxone. There’s hope in the first mosh pit of the semester and there’s hope in the guitarist asking Fran: “can I take a pic of your board?” There’s hope in Songs in the Key of Life and in Master of Puppets and in the Fame and in When the Pawn. Mostly there’s hope in each other and increasingly that’s all we have.

This America, when it’s just big open spaces and adorable city-towns, this time-warp of stoplights on cables, this country road that never ends, this sky bigger than big and bluer than blue, is where we sit, right now, motoring through it, an atrocious $4 a gallon, beautiful free shots of fernet, and a million vultures, circling. Give me a song to sing and I’ll do it perfectly, I promise, because I promise, I want to bear it all.