Five Finger Death Punch brings me back to the days in my dad’s tiny white Celica, cramped in the back, being kicked by my brothers and wiping sweat off my face, suffering in the summer heat because we don’t have air conditioning and in the winter the only options are cook at 450 degrees or freeze. It brings me back to my dad with his wrinkly forehead and scruffy face, turning the music so loud that he can’t hear our complaining and we can’t hear each other. My sister is the lucky one because she gets the front seat because she’s the oldest and she pushes her seat back so that my knees are cramped and I push back on her seat and she gets angry cause I’m pushing her seat but she can’t go anywhere else so she’ll have to deal. Eventually we all settle down and I rest my head on the tiny triangle window to look at the beautiful blue sky, my little brother falls asleep, his head barely supported by his seatbelt and his head flopping around like a dying fish, my head bouncing and hitting the window every time we hit a pothole in the bad roads of our small town, but I’m too lazy to lift my head on my own and just let my head hit the window over and over again, the lyrics vibrating through my head and bouncing around in that empty skull, lips lazily following along to the lyrics that I only half understand. I try not to pay attention to the elbow jamming on purpose into my side that my brother could literally put anywhere else but he choses my side, and now today the songs “Bad Company” and “House Of The Rising Sun” are taking me back to a time when my only worry was the foot space that I wanted and that my brother was taking and that my sister pushed her seat back farther than it needed to be, and my other brother was gonna get whiplash if he didn’t wake up soon and my father was gonna lose his hair the longer we were in that stupid white Celica with a steel skeleton and headlights that popped out of the hood and looked like eyes.