| We do what we can, though. “Mission Viejo” is a drug song. It’s no secret that practically all drug songs suck. People who get high and write about it are some of the most boring people in the world, and the hardest-core junkie songwriters know well enough to prefer writing about almost anything else to penning dull, self-congratulatory odes to their boring junkie lives. “Mission Viejo” is also an end-of-summer song, a subgenre of pop song that’s produced more unlistenable pap than almost any other. Writing an authentic drug song involves walking a tightrope between formal verisimilitude and narrative detachment; writing a decent end-of-summer song is, on the evidence, damn near impossible. Finn’s solution is to place his junkie narrator at the end of a drug-addled summer promising to quit when school starts up: “When classes start I'll quit/i've got until September 6th,” he says toward the end of the song. This, then, is a recognizable character; unlike all the trite, jobless, edgewalking beautiful desperation boys in all the lousy drug songs we’ve all had to endure, this fellow has something to do with his life besides sit around waiting for some songwriter creep to romanticize him. He gets our sympathy, because unless we’re incredibly straight-laced, we’ve known somebody like him, and we’ve probably spent an idle hour or two hoping he’d get his act together. Because of our unkillable optimism, we usually feel confident that our friend will climb out of his own wreckage and realize his potential. |