Suffering and Fall Out Boy while trying to escape my parents' neighborhood

Oct. 7—For a moment, so fleeting it may not have even existed, there's hope that I'll be able to escape my parents' neighborhood before Fall Out Boy drives me insane.

"We could be immortals," Patrick Stump screams at me for the thirty-seven-thousandth time. From the back seat of my Toyota Yaris, my 7-year-old daughter struggles to harmonize with the lead singer's distinctly piercing vocals.

As I stare at the endless lines of cars coming from either direction, the left turn I need to take to make it home seems all but impossible.

"We'll need to be immortal if we're ever going to get out of here," I whisper to myself as Stump wails that we are again and again and again.

Although she can't hear a word I'm yelling when it's about turning off her TV and cleaning her room, Arlie somehow manages to hear my pin-drop comment over the chugging guitars and thumping bass of the song she insists we listen to several hundred consecutive times.

"What did you say, Daddy?" she wants to know as I slowly inch my car forward upon spotting a brief gap between a Ford pickup heading north and a Kawasaki crotch rocket headed south.

The distraction was enough to make me momentarily question whether my Yaris' four meager cylinders could muster up the speed necessary to weave between far faster vehicles and miss our window of opportunity. Fortunately, the verse we'd already heard twice in the five minutes we'd been in the car drowned out the sound of my profanity.

"Sometimes the only payoff for having any faith is when it's tested again and again every day," Stump sings to us. For a moment, I forget how much I hate the song and relate.

My eyes locked on the lines of cars stretching into the horizon in either direction, I tell Arlie I was just making a joke. Go back to singing.

"What?" she wants to know. "I can't hear you, Daddy."

I turn the music down just as Stumps starts crooning on and on about us possibly being immortals again.

"I said ...," I said, "... don't worry about it. I was just making a joke."

"Oh, OK," Arlie said. Then, "I can't hear the music."

With a deep breath, I increase the volume to where it almost was before.

"It's still too quiet," Arlie yells. I crank it up to its original, painful volume. Stump informs several dozen more times that we might be able to be immortals.

My mind drifts as I watch the cars pass, my dream of one day leaving my parents' neighborhood and actually making it home seeming more and more fantastical by the second. I wonder where all of these people are going, why this particular stretch of Tupelo is so busy at 7:46 on a Wednesday evening. Had their days been, like mine, utterly exhausting? Had the hours they spent at work brimmed with frustrations — meetings and junk emails and plans gone awry — as mine had? Are these travelers also heading home while mid-2000s pop-punk music assaults their ears?

It seems unlikely, and this makes me resent them even more than their unwillingness not to tailgate one another already has.

"We could be immortals," Stump and my daughter wail in unison. "Immortals, immortals, immortals."

As I stare at the glow of headlights bleeding one into the next into the next into infinity, I sincerely hope they're wrong.

ADAM ARMOUR is the news editor for the Daily Journal and former general manager of The Itawamba County Times. You may reach him via his Twitter handle, @admarmr.