From time to time, I check up on the happy hours at the bars I spent college in: $2.50 for the Troegenator? It’s a wonder I ever made it out.

It was low-level debauchery, really; a lot of last calls, a lot of floors in a lot of friends’ apartments. At one point we reclaimed a beer pong table from a sorority dorm— it was a joke at first, not that we didn’t use the thing plenty. That cheap-vodka-through-the-Brita-filter thing? Totally works. I’m told my birthday that year ended with me standing on my roommate’s couch, belting Sammy Hagar’s “Eagles Fly” at a somewhat unreasonable volume, then falling into his bookshelf. I do love that song. We weren’t enslaved, just enthralled. Well-meaning but wayward.

I went and saw the Hold Steady that summer at this little bar-under-a-bar a couple hours away. That first time, I dragged somebody along; the next time they came through, it felt like I knew half the crowd. Tramps like us saw something of ourselves in tramps like the Hold Steady, and their early songs got scratched into our souls. Fucking up holds a certain romance when you’re that age— a sweet, fleeting feeling when consequences seem less consequential. But after a while, doing stupid things all the time wears on a person. Besides, I was starting to get letters about the things I hadn’t done.

We’d always play the Hold Steady at parties, but it was those late-morning spins of Separation Sunday— lyric book in the hand that wasn’t holding my head— that really made dents. Craig Finn sometimes seems to be romanticizing excess but, in fact, he just happens to sympathize with those who do. Some of us may never get over this, he seems to be saying, but a lot of us will. And a lot of us did: Gideon’s a librarian, Holly tends a kindergarten. As for that college that almost cut me loose? I teach there now