Back on Aug. 1, 2010, I officially launched Stry. I was a month into my three-month stay in Biloxi. I wasn’t making any money, and I wasn’t really sure what was going to happen to me. That night, I wrote down this thought about my future. I’m sharing it here on the Interwebs for the first time.

The weird thing about this point in my life is how little I actually want. I do not want to buy a fancy car, or to own a private plane, or to have any sort of extravagance. I’m unemployed, and trying to turn this period into self-employment. I would be happy with enough money to keep the lights on.

The only thing I really want these days is enough money for food. In San Antonio, I bought expensive cheese and frivolous amounts of quesadillas. And I could afford it. At no point did I worry about being able to feed myself. That was nice.

Right now, I’m not in that position. I have no source of income. I think about the quality of the apples I’m buying before I buy them. I see orange juice as a luxury item.

I do not want to be rich. I just want to be able to live without wondering whether or not the apples in my hand are above my economic status.

It is 72 degrees in St. Louis today, and it is January. This, by itself, would be considered unusual, except that today, something even more unusual is happening:

I am traveling on Amtrak.

When I was a kid, living just outside Washington, D.C., I used to love traveling by train. I loved riding D.C.’s subway, the Metro. I knew every stop on the Red Line. I knew every transfer point. I used to love traveling down to D.C.’s Union Station, and on the rare occasion in which we got to hop on a train and head to New York, I was always terribly excited. Such an elegant, simple form of transportation, I thought; a big coal engine powering towards the big city.⁽¹⁾

Still, when I got older, riding trains lost its luster. I remember when I was a kid, I saw an episode of “Reading Rainbow.” LeVar Burton rode along the American Southwest by train, sleeping in a private sleeping car, the cities rolling by as he dreamt.⁽²⁾ No billboards, no roadside chains. Just a railroad cutting a wide swatch through open countryside.

When I went to school out in Missouri, I told my friends that I wanted to go home for winter break once by Amtrak. Just a short train from St. Louis to Chicago, then an overnight home to D.C. My friends looked at me like I was suggesting Spring Break: Darfur.

Looking back, I’m not all that suprised by their reaction. I’d like to think my friends feel the way most Americans feel about Amtrak: As thought it’s slightly less desirable than traveling via oxen-led wagon. Travel to Europe, and the trains there are new, fast, clean. Barcelona to Madrid in 2.5 hours! Wide seats! Quiet cars!

By comparison, Amtrak feels like riding in a Yugo. Right now, I am sitting in an Amtrak car, traveling north to Chicago. To travel the distance via Megabus — the low-fare coach famous for $1 seats — would’ve cost me $66 each way. On Amtrak? $28.80.

Megabus comes with 120 volt electrical ports at every seat, and WiFi throughout.

This Amtrak train, by comparison, lacks air conditioning. It’s 72 degrees outside, and pushing 80 inside the car.

I am sweating and sweating, and I have already stripped off two layers of outerwear, and I am starting to understand why Americans look at the Amtrak experience the way it very well may be intended:

As a form of punishment.

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Flying kind of feels like that too, these days. It didn’t use to. I remember this airline that used to fly out of D.C.’s National Airport, called Business Express. They served me biscotti cookies, and it’s likely that no one in recorded human history has reacted to biscotti cookies with quite as much excitement as I did that day. Flights meant meals, and airplane wings to pin to your coat, and sometimes even in-flight movies. I reminded my mom the other day of the flight we took out to Salt Lake City when I was in first grade. I told her that they showed “Mrs. Doubtfire” on the flight.

She wanted to know how I could remember such a thing, but really, how could I ever forget?

I was 6.

They showed a funny movie on an airplane.

At that point in my life, it was probably the single funniest movie I’d ever seen.

I was in the sky, watching a funny movie.

How could I ever forget that?

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I’m actually not moving from this very Amtrak car, even as the temperatures rise. The motor for the A/C whirs and whirs, but nothing cool seems to blow out of the vents. The car up ahead is cooler, maybe even in the 70s. But it’s also packed with teenagers, and loud. My car, for all the heat, is at least quiet. People keep standing up from my car and moving elsewhere. The car keeps getting less and less crowded. And somehow, the thought of five hours in a quiet sauna seems to beat five hours of noisy chill.

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We stop in Alton, Illinois. There is a sign on the platform, white text on blue background, that says so. It is about the size of a piece of loose leaf paper.⁽³⁾

This is somewhere, I guess.

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There are a lot of kids on this train, and I think I’m starting to understand why parents — especially the single parents who seem abundant on this train — would prefer Amtrak to other forms of transport: It’s easy to be a kid on a train. There’s lots of space to move, and there’s no real understanding among the passengers about how to behave on these things. The couple behind me is gossiping and eating Triscuits. In the car behind me, a group of teenage girls moves in pack, squealing each time the train takes a bump and throws them off their stride. Two girls in black, kind of in goth dress but without any of the hallmark makeup, appear to be power walking up and down the train, though I’d expect to see a pedometer or two soon if they’re to keep up this pace. The kids, meanwhile, almost skip-walk through the train, alternately noisy and silent.

We’re traveling through strange, unidentifiable land, and as long as people keep their hands and feet inside the vehicle, nobody seems to even notice — or at least, mind — what anyone else is up to.

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I suppose I’m building to a point here, which is that travel has this strange, wondrous quality when you’re a child. It’s magic, really: The Journey! To unknown lands! The airplane stewardness hands you a pair of pin-on wings, and suddenly you feel like an explorer of the skies, venturing into the unknown. Or you’re on the road, and the miles roll by in your mom’s stationwagon. You’re playing the license plate game, and every state feels like a new discovery. It is new, and it is strange, and it is wonderful, so much so that you hardly even notice how uncomfortable travel is.

Or maybe uncomfortable is the wrong word. Unremarkable is more like it. The thrill of travel wears off. It becomes common, and then dull, and then a nuisance. This trip to Chicago? Five hours, and even though I don’t have to do anything other than sit here, it’s almost annoyingly plain. A big part of these trips — or layover-induced waiting, for that matter — is just finding a way to endure the boredom.

Maybe that’s why adults hardly ever seem to get excited about travel. I can remember only one exception: In seventh grade, my family flew to London, and we did so in British Airways’ business class. When we landed at Heathrow, my father and I were the last ones to disembark. Neither of us wanted to leave the plane. We’d never before been treated with such hospitality.

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I start looking for that old travel magic, and I find it in the seat pocket. Well, the lack of things in the seat pocket, at least. There’s no magazine on this train. Nothing but a safety guide. On airplanes, I love flipping open the in-pocket magazine to the back pages, and tracing my fingers over the route map. There’s no such map here, and no signage as to where we’re actually traveling. This train makes stops, but I don’t know where. I am somewhere in Illinois, and I am traveling at moderate speed in the general direction of Chicago. I have no real idea where I am. I do not know the route. Aside from a passing Wal-Mart, nothing much seems familiar.

I am headed towards Chicago, and I am confident that I will get there, though I do not exactly know how.

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We make a stop in Carlinville. The station is about the size of a Chevrolet Suburban. Maybe smaller. It’s not clear how the conductor even knows to stop there. I imagine some days, the train passes right on through Carlinville, only to realize at the next stop that they’ve left passengers behind.

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The air conditioning comes on. Well, maybe not A/C. But air that could definitely be described as “not hot.” This, as far as I am concerned, is major progress.

I’m upgrading my Amtrak experience from “travel-themed punishment” to “not entirely uncomfortable.”

I’m also beginning to notice — and I’m not sure if it was like this the whole time, or it’s just because the sun is down at about 10 o’clock on the horizon, and the light is just so — but the windows seem shaded in such a way that the world outside has this sepia glow. I feel like I’m traveling through a moving Instapaper portrait of America, and it’s actually rather soothing.

I’ve decided to re-upgrade my Amtrak experience to “not all that bad, now that I think about it.”

And other things, too: The seats are decently wide, and the leg room is considerably more generous than coach seats on planes. Parking at St. Louis was easy — even securely gated — and I didn’t have to put my bag through an x-ray machine or take my shoes off before getting on the train.

I decide to hold my Amtrak experience at “not all that bad, now that I think about it.” For now, at least.

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We coast into Springfield. That seems like the right verb here. Speeds into Springfield is certainly not right. It doesn’t seem like the conductor is trying to stop the train, either. Mostly, it seems like he’s taken his foot off the pedal, and we’re just hoping to lose inertia by the time the platform arrives.

We coast into Springfield.

On the left is a big domed building, that concrete-gray that all the government buildings back home have, and then a darker gray dome on top. I am not sure if it is gray, or cobalt, or maybe a charcoal offshoot of gray. I don’t know much about colors, but I do know enough about domes to guess that it’s the Capital building for this state. It is probably the last thing I will see before it gets dark.

And it is getting seriously dark now. The not-hot air continues to blow above me, and Chicago is up ahead, though I am not sure where. I am confident I will get there, but I do not now how.

The train starts to fill up. I’ve got an empty seat beside me for now, but I probably won’t by the next stop. There are four or five cars on this train, 19 rows in each car, four seats in each row. The ticket-taker tells me that by Chicago, they’ll all be full.

Who knew that this many people still traveled by train?

We coast into Springfield, and then we roll onward to Chicago, into the dark.

Forbes ran a story on their website this week about Best Buy. The lead paragraph read:

“Electronics retailer Best Buy is headed for the exits. I can’t say when exactly, but my guess is that it’s only a matter of time, maybe a few more years.”

Then it went on to detail numerous problems with Best Buy’s supply chain.

Now, I have a friend who’s about to start a new job this year with Best Buy. She’ll be working with their supply chain. So I sent her the link.

Naturally, she was bummed. She started saying that, well, at least she’d get a nice line on her résumé out of the job. At least she wasn’t really planning on staying there all that long.

And that crushed me. Because it wasn’t too long ago that I was reading headlines like this about my own industry:

“Sometime soon, millions of people may find themselves unwittingly involved in a test that could profoundly change their daily routines, local economies and civic lives.

“They’ll have to figure out how to keep up with City Hall, their neighborhoods and their kids’ schools — as well as store openings, new products and sales — without a 170-year-old staple of daily life: a local newspaper.”

Newspapers and big-box stores: we’re not all that different. So I sent my soon-to-be-working-at-Best-Buy friend back an email. It read:

Hey, I work in journalism. My senior year, I every morning, I went to a site called Paper Cuts to see which newspapers were slashing newsroom jobs that day. I say this all the time: Journalism companies are in love with their own demise. Back then, I was too.

And looking back, I’m horrified. Why glorify your own downfall? We journalists have infinite tools at our disposal. Why not spend more time focusing on making journalism more awesome?

Anyway, I suppose that’s the challenge before you: Either buy into Best Buy’s slow demise, or get working at making everything you touch more awesome.

Time to get into the latter category. I hope my friend at Best Buy will. I hope my friends in journalism will, too.

But what I would like to discuss is a sort of corollary to the bucket list. See: We have the bucket list, which looks long term. We have the to-do list, which covers the immediate.

What we don’t have is that list for the in-betweens in our lives.

I had a conversation with a friend last week, and I brought up this mantra that I’ve been carrying around for a few years now: “In this life, you find things you love and people you love, and you make time for both.”

And she said the most wonderful thing: Well, I suppose I should start making a list of things.

I couldn’t agree more. Because, I suppose, that’s really what I did at about this time last year. It wasn’t a bucket list that I started thinking about; I wasn’t looking to compile things that I hadn’t yet done in my life. Really, I was looking at things that I just wasn’t making enough time for in my day-to-day life, and seeing which of them I’d like to find time for in the coming months.

I didn’t write that list down, sadly, but if I had, my 2011 List of Things I Love would’ve looked like:

See more live music
Join a sports team
Find more opportunities for spontaneity
Read more often
Launch a side project
Do more yoga
Write and code

I’m proud to say that I checked almost all of those off the list this year. I’ve seen 35 concerts this year, from local bands releasing their first album to U2. I joined a kickball team in DC. I made a few spur-of-the-moment decisions. (What? There’s a Groupon for skydiving? Yeah, I’m in!) I’ve read 12 books, and I’ll be through 13 by year’s end. I didn’t quite launch BooksAround, my social literacy experiment, but I can get that done in the next two weeks. I took weekly hot yoga classes. I’m blogging more than ever, and I worked my way through a CSS tutorial. All in all, I made a lot of time for a lot of things that had gotten lost since college.

And yes, being active with that list meant that I also got to cross stuff off the bucket list. (Skydiving? Check. Visiting Israel? Check. Going to a show at Red Rocks? Check.)

Now I’m thinking about next year’s List of Things. I’d like to keep all of the above in play, but I’d also like to add three things:

Travel more
Speak publicly
Ship things

The first is self-explanatory. I love to travel, and I’d love to make more time for it next year. I don’t have any specific places in mind; I’d just like to get up and go.

The second is something I’ve come around on this year. In 2011, I’ve twice gotten a chance to give speeches to 150+ person rooms, and I’ve learned that it’s a hell of a rush. I used to fear public speaking. Not anymore. I’m never going to be a stand-up comic, so getting 150 people to keel over in laughter during a PowerPoint is about as close as I’m going to get to that sensation. I really love getting up in front of a big room, and I want to find more opportunities to speak in public next year.

And as for the third thing, that’s a business term I’d never even heard until this year. But it means: Create a product and bring it to market. Make stuff and put it out in the world for people to use.

I’ve spent a hell of a long time with Stry — from concept to now, I’m well over 18 months into this company — and what I’ve got to show for it is some blogging from Biloxi, my current fellowship and a few public appearances. What I need to do in 2012 is get this thing out in the world. I need to ship, and ship more often. I love the feeling of satisfaction that comes from getting little items done on a project. I want to experience what it’s like to bring something big to market.

So that’s my 2012 List of Things. What’s yours?

At age 24, there are certain things I’ve come to believe hold true. I know that my beliefs will change. I know that I will change.

But here, at 24, is what I believe:

-Try not to regret bad decisions. Just make the best decisions you can with the best information you have.
-When you find that you’ve done wrong, and you have a chance to make it right, don’t idle.
-Uncertainty breeds opportunity.
-Be spontaneous.
-Listening is an active process.
-So is life. Don’t be passive.
-Only the people who show up get to make change. So show up.
-Don’t be afraid to fail.
-It’s alright to get rejected. Getting rejected means you’re trying.
-At 18, you don’t know that you don’t know what you want.
-At 24, you know that you don’t know what you want.
-Sometimes, you’ve got to do it for the story.
-Do something. Be something.
-Define your greatness, and then go out and do something about it.

And most of all, this:

-In this life, you find things you love and people you love, and you make time for both.

I’m just trying to live up to that every day.

Those lovely people in the photo at top: My little brother, my little sister, my dad, and me.

Every once in a while, I get to meet someone who just knocks me over. Someone doing something inspiring and risky and ambitious and epic. Someone who’s doing something incredible.

And last night, I met three ladies who are traveling America in an RV, doing good deeds and inspiring others to chase big dreams. I couldn’t help but be bowled over by the Girls Gone Moto. They started talking about their stories — how they embraced the fear, how they found a dream to chase — and I started thinking of my own story.

See, I remember when I was leaving San Antonio and headed to Biloxi to start Stry. I remember how terrified I was. I remember thinking that there were a million steps ahead of me. I remember thinking, What if it all works? What if it succeeds? What if it turns into a real business? What if I hire employees? What if people start depending on me? What then?

I’d never done any of that, and it all seemed overwhelming. The thought of success seemed overwhelming. So I let the fear in a little bit, and then the questions started changing. I stopped thinking about all the baby steps ahead of me, and started thinking, Well, what if I can’t do this? What if I shouldn’t?

But I know now: There’s a part of the brain that loves to sabotage dreams. It’s the naysayer within your subconscious. And I know now: Sometimes, you have to embrace that fear and blow right past it.

I did, and I can’t begin to describe the sensation of knocking fear back on its ass. It’s an amazing feeling.

And no, the fear doesn’t ever just go away. But once you’ve conquered it once, you’ll always know that you can conquer it again.

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This is not a motivational blog post. I am not writing this to inspire you. I do not want you to read this and quit your job.

Is that clear?

Are you sure?

Positive?

Because I go to Mach 1 pretty quickly on these things. I get wound up and start running like Lombardi before the Ice Bowl, like a guy who’s got an Espresso drip running in one arm and the soundtrack to ‘The Natural’ blasting in the earbuds. I get wound up, and sometimes, the fortune cookie quotes start leaking out.

It’s all this one girl’s fault. I was having a beer with an MU student on Wednesday. J-school senior here on campus. Ambitious, talented, overworked. She wanted to know about me and my startup. And like any student worth her journalism degree, she had a good question for me:

Why are you doing what you’re doing?

And I didn’t answer it well enough. Lately, all the questions have been forward leaning: What are you doing now? What are you doing next?

But it’s been a while since someone asked me, straight up: Why are you doing what you’re doing?

I didn’t give her the full answer yesterday. So right now, I’d like to tell her, for starters:

I’m doing this because I can. Because there’s opportunity for something like Stry. Because it’s risky. Because I want to learn. Because I don’t have 2.5 kids and a wife and a job and a mortgage. Because I had the money to get it started, and maybe I’ll find the money to keep it going. Because I hated life in a cubicle. Because I’m too naive to know that failure is all but certain for a startup like this. Because I made it this far, and yeah, Red, maybe I can go a little farther. Because I think the phrase “You can be whatever you want to be” needs another case study. Because I want to do the work. Because I like doing the work. Because I like being busy, and not TPS Report busy or Conference Call With the Head of Whatchamacallit busy. Because this is the time I have, and this is what I have to work with, and because I’ve got people behind me who seem to think I can pull this off, and because so do I, and mostly:

Because I can.

There are not a lot of things I believe in completely — I’m not Crash Davis, alright? — but I believe this: In this life, you find things you love and people you love, and make room for both.

Right now, with Stry, I’ve got something I love. I wake up in the morning excited to get up. I know that sounds like some “Jerry Maguire” BS, but it’s true. I love coming to work. This company sinks or swims based on what I do. It’s on me. This thing goes as far as I can take it.

That’s terrifying and empowering and thrilling, and it’s my day-to-day existence. I love that.

And, yeah, the fortune cookie quotes start leaking out sometimes. But I don’t mind that. I had a yoga teacher in San Antonio who told me once, “Trying is doing.”

So why am I doing what I’m doing?

Maybe it’s because I just had to try.

When that was over, Gregory opened up the floor to questions.

This is the part of the lecture I hate.

Not the idea of Q&A. That I love. We need more Q&A in our lives, and not just at big fancy lectures involving salt-and-pepper-haired reporters in nice blazers. We need lots of thoughtful questions and lots of thoughtful answers in our day-to-day lives. And we need everyone to be asking and thinking and listening in order to be part of this nice little experiment in domestic living that we’ve got going on here in America.

Participation is a very, very good thing, and I encourage it highly.

What I dislike is that I ever since I got my degree from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, something’s changed for me. I’ll be at a lecture like I was tonight. I’ll be there with someone else. Let’s call this man, for the sake of accuracy, my father. The moderator will open up the floor to questions. And I will sit back in my chair and listen to questions being asked.

Dad does not like this.

See, my father does not see me as a reporter. Or a journalist. Or a writer. He sees me as a Professional Question Asker. That’s what he believes I earned a degree in out in ol’ Columbia, Mo. And when an opportunity to use my Professional Question Asking skills passes without me asking a question… well, he sees it as an invalidation of my college degree.

And I find this funny. Because I am most definitely not a Professional Question Asker. If there’s anything my Mizzou degree certifies, it’s that I’m a Professional Listener. My job is, if at all possible, to shut up and listen. And then report what I’ve learned. That’s why I’m usually in the back of the room scribbling notes on the lecture program.

At these Q&As, I do this quite well.

Dad does not like this.

Sorry, pops.

But here’s what I’m thinking: Pilots don’t get asked to fly planes on their day off. Bobby Flay doesn’t get thrown behind the grill every time he goes out to eat. Librarians don’t just show up at random libraries and start implementing the Dewey Decimal System.

So I suppose it’s with several years of Professional Question Asking behind me that I ask this: Why do I keep getting picked on?

I remember that I didn’t like music all that much. I’d spent my childhood listening to sports talk radio — to 570, and then to 980 when it moved up the radio dial. I’d come home from school, and I’d catch the last hour of Tony Kornheiser’s show. I’d start my homework, and Andy Pollin and a team of local reporters would be talking about Redskins season. I’d go to bed listening to Ken Beatrice, a host with a Boston accent that would’ve shamed the “Car Talk” guys.

There wasn’t a backing track to my childhood as much as there was a whine — a low drone of Washingtonians, watching their sports franchises sink further into the muck, their only outlet a radio call-in show that catered to the most neurotic, most obsessed among us.

It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I started listening to music. It started during a summer up on the Cape, when I’d discovered a classic rock station with good taste. I learned that I liked U2 and Stevie Ray Vaughan. I discovered the Guess Who, and I remember listening to a lot of J. Geils Band. I made my first — and only — radio call-in request that summer: Van Halen, “Hot for Teacher.”

That fall, with some coupons I’d been birthday gifted, I went out and bought my first two CDs: Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Greatest Hits,” and Jet’s “Get Born.” My first car, my grandpa’s Olds Eighty-Eight, had been passed on to a cousin. I’d come into possession of another Olds, this one white, and with a CD player. For all of three or four minutes in the morning, on the drive from Wood Acres to Walt Whitman, I rocked.

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Of course, this isn’t a story about an 18-year-old who gets an Oldsmobile and falls in love with a quartet of Australian rockers who ripped off Iggy Pop. That wouldn’t be much of a story, really.

No, this is about this one moment I remember.

I remember that I’d made a left turn that day onto Whittier. I remember that it one of those in-between days in late winter — maybe February, maybe March — where the words “unseasonably warm” come to mind. I remember that my friend, Alyssa, had burned me a CD of a band she liked.

I remember turning left in my white Olds, and the school day ending, and the windows down, and the volume a little too loud, and the sound I didn’t know I wanted to hear.

The band was the Black Keys, and the first song on that CD was “10 A.M. Automatic.” It’s the kind of song that jolts you if you’re not ready for it.

Three notes in, I wanted to know where this band had been hiding from me. They had this massive sound. The recording sounded like it had been aging for decades.

Why hadn’t the classic rock stations been playing these guys?

I went home and Googled them, and I learned two things:

1.) They weren’t an old band. These guys were in their mid-twenties.

2.) There were only two of them.

Two guys could make a sound this big?

I bought their second CD, “Thickfreakness.” Then their first. I got to college, and I started buying more blues albums: Sonny Landreth, Hubert Sumlin. I read that Sumlin had played with a Howlin’ Wolf, so I had to look him up. I read that Howlin’ Wolf had been a contemporary of a Muddy Waters, so I Googled him.

Then I started working as a DJ at the college radio station, and that opened up an entire library of blues artists I’d never known. They’re old friends now: Lightning Hopkins, Cephas & Wiggins, Townes Van Zandt.

The Black Keys came to Columbia, Mo., in the winter of my sophomore year. I remember them being loud, and at points, louder-than-loud. I remember smiling as big as I’ve ever smiled.

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There was the other thing I remember, too: I remember wondering why more people didn’t listen to this band I loved.

How could you listen to a song like “10 A.M. Automatic” and not love these guys?

I remember staying up late one night, before we had DVR. It was back in my senior year, a few months after I’d heard the band for the first time. They were playing Letterman. YouTube wasn’t out yet. I’d never seen them perform before. I remember looking around the TV, trying to see if there was someone else back there playing guitar or bass. I just couldn’t see how two guys could make that much sound.

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I remember the first time I heard one of their songs as a backing track on a TV show, but I don’t remember the show. It was either “Entourage” or “Friday Night Lights.” But I remember smiling, because I knew someone else out there was going to hear that sound and fall for it just like I had.

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This year, the Black Keys released an album called “Brothers.” It was their third full album since “Rubber Factory” — the LP with “10 A.M. Automatic” on it — had been released. Their most recent album, “Attack & Release,” had been produced by DJ Danger Mouse, he of Gnarls Barkley fame. The two band members, Dan and Patrick, had each released a side project. They’d also backed a hugely ambitious rap project, called BlakRoc, that somehow worked.

I’d been listening to the band for five years, and I’d pretty much accepted the fact that the Keys weren’t going to ever go mainstream. And I was okay with that.

And then they went big.

They won a VMA. Ended up on “Colbert.” Played “SNL.” Had a few music videos top a million hits on YouTube. Stopped playing dingy venues and started playing amphitheaters and concert halls.

This Sunday, they might win a Grammy.

I hope they win.

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The hipster’s dilemma, of course, is that I’m not supposed to feel that way. The Keys were the first band I ever loved, I ever felt was mine. And now they’re everyone’s. I’ll never get to see them play a venue as crappy as Columbia’s Blue Note again, and that’s where they’re meant to be heard. In a dungeon, preferably, or at least some place with exposed pipes and $2 PBR drafts. Last time they were in D.C., they played 5,000-seat DAR Constitution Hall. Next time, they’ll probably play Verizon Center, and 18,000 people will show up to watch.

They’re still one of my favorite bands, but they’re not just my band anymore.

But if they win this Sunday? Some kid’s going to go out, and… well, actually, no, that’s not entirely right. Some kid’s going to open up iTunes. He’s going to download “Rubber Factory.” He’s going to load it onto his iPod. He’ll go out for a drive. Maybe it’ll be a sunny day. Maybe the windows will be down.

Maybe he’ll hear those first three notes of “10 A.M. Automatic” like I heard them.

I hope he does.

❡❡❡

I actually remember this one other thing. I was watching an episode of “Friday Night Lights.” This was about a year ago. It was one of those classic “FNL” montages — no words, just some light music and darkness falling and Dillon, TX, slowly melting away. I remember the music well: some fingerpicking on guitar, and a voice that absolutely ached.

I remember Googling the lyrics. The song was, “When The Night Comes,” by Dan Auerbach.

Dan Auerbach, the lead singer of the Black Keys.

And I remember feeling like I’d rediscovered that sound all over again.

You don’t forget something like that.

But yesterday, I took a visit to Biloxi National Cemetery, on the grounds of Keesler Air Force Base, and I realized that I’d been ignoring the most obvious closing thought of all: the ones engraved into tombstones. What could be more final than the words printed on one’s grave?

So this week, I’ll be featuring Biloxi tombstones as my #closingthought. There were dozens and dozens to choose from; selecting picking the final five was an impossible task. One, in particular, is getting left out, but it deserves to be seen.

So below, this is the closing thought that every male journalist wants printed on his tombstone: