I. ZOOS

Have you ever felt like a gecko who's in a zoo in a glass enclosure, and you're trying to play it cool - maybe doing some pushups - but really you aren't feeling super comfortable with a bunch of huge humans staring at you?

I've felt that way once or twice.

Never is this more apparent than when people try to guess my sexuality, drug habits (or lack thereof) and yes, music taste, by how I look. So, one fateful day after a seminar class my first year of college, this green-haired, nail-painted, at the time eyeliner-equipped writer was greeted by:

"It's indie music, isn't it."

"No, are you kidding? That's way too mainstream. It's probably, like, underground dubstep."

"Oh, come on! I listen to EDM. He's definitely not into it." At this point I am slightly surrounded by curious onlookers, my face looking approximately like the above gecko.

A clean-shaven, glasses-comporting classmate cleared his throat and spoke: "I know what it is. You're SO indie that you go to the discard bin at WPRB and listen to THAT!"

I finally decide to answer, "I guess I listen to punk rock?"

"OH," one of my classmates responded, clearly relieved now that he had been able to match my appearance with an intelligible subculture.

"Like Blink-182?"

I was going to respond, "Um, not really..." - but it didn't matter. They had gotten the information they wanted; I was left with an identity crisis. This was no small thing. It made me question every decision leading up to that fateful moment. How did I get to this place? I have only been inside a Hot Topic once. I think fart jokes are funny, but I never thought "I fucked your mom" jokes were. I've never tried to get dreadlocks. I stopped listening to Green Day when they started starring in musicals. WHERE DID I GO WRONG?

II. I DON'T LISTEN TO BLINK-182, OKAY?

For the subsequent year and a half of my life I have written in my journal, "I don't listen to Blink-182. OKAY?"

But they keep showing up in my life. More than one friend has tried to get me to like "Adam's Song."

After roughly 600 pages of weary journaling, fate finally granted me respite. As I had descended into new lows the depths of which I had never imaged, so, it seemed, had the band.

This past April, Blink-182 announced that they would be releasing a new album, "California," without Tom DeLonge, their original guitarist and singer with the oh-so-recognizable nasal voice.

Specifically, what it meant was that the Unholy Trinity that had been haunting my existence - Tom DeLonge, Travis Barker, and Mark Hoppus - had lost its structural integrity. The curse was broken. I no longer had fever dreams of getting a lip ring and a faux hawk. I never again felt tempted to wear cargo shorts and a backwards snapback.

But oh boy did the eulogies come in fast. In June, Kelly Dickerson from Mic lamented that Blink-182 "wrote the soundtrack for the lives of rebellious teens around the world."

Personally, this makes me feel like we aren't giving "rebellious teens around the world" very much credit. I mean to say that I don't find a crazy amount of rebellion, teenage or not, in songs about watching girls change, how cool frat parties are, bestiality, and other not-so-vaguely-misogynistic-crap.

But that's beside the point. My demons were gone, but a poor, heartbroken man with a net worth of $60 million had some of his own. For Tom DeLonge was obsessed with aliens, and I wanted to try to figure out why.

III. ALIEN(ATION)

According to the man himself, he has been obsessed with aliens since middle school. But don't call them aliens, he insists:

"The government spends a lot of time and a lot of money throwing that term out there. But it's much more complex than that."

I hopefully don't need to remind you that the government spends money on plenty of horrible things. Unfortunately, spreading the vernacular use of the word "alien" (to describe extraterrestrials, that is) simply isn't one of them. But hey, I could be wrong - let's see what the "more complex" part of the answer was:

"Maybe they [aliens] sent drones here. I'm starting with the idea there's been something else here all along ... It's all around us. I know of stuff I can't talk about right now."

It seems that DeLonge isn't making it particularly easy for those who are still listening to him to be able to respond without instant condescension and snark. "Well," you might say, "this guy is worth $60 million, but he sure is an idiot."

And an idiot he might very well be, but that doesn't explain how a person goes from getting signed to gargantuan record deals to peddling conspiracy theories (or, for that matter, going from writing "I don't listen to Blink-182. OKAY?" in one's journal every day to not writing a daily "I don't listen to Blink-182. OKAY?" in one's journal).

Which gets me to a conversation I had with a very good friend of mine. He told me something like this: "There's alienation everywhere. Not aliens, but alienation."

And what sort of alienation, you might be asking? Well, I would answer the big kind. The seismic kind. We live in the richest country perhaps in the history of ever, but 45 million people live below the poverty line. We inhabit a planet where the richest 62 people are as wealthy as the poorest 3.7 billion. There's no real way to make sense of that. And for Tom DeLonge, who wrote songs about his teenage years well into his thirties before getting kicked out of a band whose last critically acclaimed album was released in 2001, being worth $60 million probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense, either.

And this mind-boggling, surreal reality that we find ourselves in might begin to explain Tom DeLonge's wholehearted belief in aliens. When the empirical reality suggests that by and large, human beings have created a system that rewards not giving a shit about one another, aliens are a pretty neat-o way to process the ongoing cultural decay and emotional emptiness we're all going through.

Put another way, when the world doesn't give a shit you, it doesn't make very much sense, because you give a shit about you. And once you start looking for reasons, the ones you find are sometimes a little strange.

Perhaps trying to get in the mindset of Tom DeLonge was a wasted exercise and the result of my own obsessions when there are far better people through which to explore late capitalist ennui. As I must concede a third time, Tom DeLonge is probably just an idiot. But maybe, just maybe, next time you encounter your local Believer In All Things Extraterrestrial, offer them a hug. They probably feel the same existential angst you do.