People flipping off H2s. (Link shamelessly stolen from Drew.)

U2, Zooropa

Grinnell�s distance from major rivers was far enough, its elevation high enough, that it was spared during the floods of 1993. A lot of towns were underwater, though, and we�d hear daily reports of absurd and surreal damage: the streets of Iowa City awash with dirty rainwater, Hancher Auditorium ruined, rowboats cruising downtown Des Moines. The local news issued repeated exhortations to stay out of the standing water because it was contaminated with �fecal matter,� among other things. Any kid who�d ever dreamed of swimming around an underwater city was probably not too keen to swim around in his neighbors� feces.

Because Grinnell stayed dry, we only experienced �The Greatest Flood Event in Recorded U.S. History� vicariously and anecdotally. I remember Clinton surveying the state by helicopter; I remember food drives and fundraisers; I remember the term �500-year storm.� I remember a lot of rainfall, obviously, which may have spelled disaster in other communities but for us meant a refreshingly cool summer. I was working at Grinnell College Dining Services, and alongside several college students who charitably treated the high schoolers on staff as peers, I dished out cafeteria food to the attendees of various summer conferences hosted on the campus. There was a great deal of comraderie that inevitably becomes the only good thing about a shitty minimum-wage job; a job that, between three meals and special catering events, eats up much of your day, forces you to get up early, leaves your hands dry and cracked and your clothes smelling of food and dishwater, and includes a bright red baseball cap in its uniform.

Like any teenager concerned about current events close to home, I watched a lot of MTV that summer. One rainy afternoon between "Beavis & Butthead" and "The Real World LA", I caught the tail end of the video for "Numb". I didn�t know U2 had a new album out; it seemed so soon after Achtung Baby and holy shit what was the Edge doing singing? Paul Hewson & Co. had finally gone off the deep end. I called Wes, who was at his �summer home� in Pennsylvania. �Have you heard the new U2 song?� �Yeah,� he said. �It�s fucking awesome!� I trusted Wes when he pronounced U2's new direction good-weird, rather than bad-weird.

Soon afterwards, my mother and brother and I took a weekend trip up to the Twin Cities, to see what the deal was with this ridiculous new mall everyone was talking about. I soon found myself riding the indoor rollercoaster at Camp Snoopy and convincing my mother to let me visit every music retailer the mall had. My brother bought Zooropa and I settled on Larks� Tongues In Aspic, which would prove to be a definitive album in my musical development, for reasons different from Zooropa�s. These albums accompanied us on the customary family trip to the East Coast, and soon U2 overtook King Crimson as my most-played album of the summer.

I spent a lot of cool afternoons on Bethany Beach (it rained a lot there, too) listening to Zooropa on my DiscMan, reveling in the deceptively simple pulses of �Some Days Are Better Than Others� or the unabashedly sentimental �Babyface� (which was, I realized even then, probably about porn). I was too naive to understand the entire breadth of �Dirty Day�, but it blew me away all the same; I could apprehend the mood, if not the substance. The same goes for �Lemon� and �Daddy�s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car�. These were songs that seemed ingenuous enough on the surface, but after a few listens they became insidious, haunting, even sinister in places. Here was a dark twin to the Eurotrash bombast of Achtung Baby, the underdog no one suspects.

As if my summer hadn�t already been strange enough, I returned from my family vacation to find out that my girlfriend was dumping me. She gave me a King James Bible as a severance gift, with a handwritten note on the inside of the cover: �What�s more important than where you will spend the rest of eternity?� She was dumping me because I wasn�t Christian enough. �Not Christian enough? But I�m Catholic!� I protested�and I was, fairly devoutly so, at the time. �That�s the probelm,� I was told. �You�re Catholic, not Christian.� Rather than try to get my head around this twisted logic, I did what any healthy sixteen-year-old would do and immersed myself in my sorrow, rendered more three-dimensional, nuanced, and sophisticated by the songs on Zooropa, which would eventually be replaced by the ones on Siamese Dream and then Vs. as a cold summer turned to a bright autumn and the music got even more baleful, more angular, more immediate, and I convinced myself I was growing up.

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