Shinedown - "Three Six Five" · Week 25

By Luca Bonafede · June 19, 2026 ·

A lot can happen in a week.

Most of my week happened on the water. I spent long stretches on a boat out on the ocean, working, under the kind of weather that looks gloomy and somehow feels magnificent. Grey on grey, with the sea doing its slow breathing. I don’t think I’d have chosen it on paper, but it was the best office I’ve had.

On land, I took photos around St. John’s, which is a city that rewards you for walking slowly with a camera. I also sent out applications for job opportunities across Canada. Quiet work, the kind that doesn’t make a good story until a year later, when it does.

And then there was the race.

The Shoppers Drug Mart 10K in St. John’s. I finished the 10 kilometers in 54:53, which put me 8th overall. The number I’ll remember more is the temperature. It felt like minus four, the coldest I have ever run in, and I stood at that start line shivering like a man who had misread the brochure.

But the story of the week isn’t the race. It’s a song.

I’ve been listening to Shinedown intensively for a few months, especially in Amsterdam, and somehow I had never heard “Three Six Five.” That week was a strange one to begin with. I wasn’t feeling my best, so I called a dear friend in Italy, and an hour on the phone with someone who knows you well does more than most things I’ve tried. Then I went into one of the most extreme workouts I’ve done in a while and came out of it properly pumped.

Afterwards I walked into Shoppers, which, by pure coincidence, was also the main sponsor of the race. I try not to wear headphones when I walk through public places, so I hear everything: the shelves, the tills, and then a song coming through the store speakers, a few minutes before closing. I did what any dignified adult would do. I stood in an aisle with my phone raised to the ceiling and Shazamed it.

Here is what stopped me in that aisle. The song is written from the point of view of someone who wishes they had a time machine. They would take a person they lost and bring them back to the present, so they would never have to watch them disappear. They said everything that mattered. They held on to the end of the rope. It still wasn’t enough to keep that person here. Then comes the line the whole song turns on: a lot can happen in a year. It lands as grief, but also as a quiet accusation, the voice wondering whether it cared enough, whether it held on the right way.

I don’t read the song as a sad one. I read it as a warning with good manners. The singer has no time machine, and neither do I. All you get is the week you are standing in. A year is a concept, a thing we measure from a distance, usually after something has already changed. A week is something you can hold. You remember what the weather was doing, who you called, what you ate, how cold your hands were at the start line. If a lot can change in a year, then most of that change is happening in weeks, and almost nobody is watching them go by.

That’s why this is the first week I wanted to file as a single memory, on purpose. Not as a blur between two months, but as its own small room with a soundtrack, a place I can walk back into.

Alan Watts used to say that the only moment we ever live in is this one, and that we spend most of it somewhere else. The singer spends the song somewhere else, in a year that is already gone. A week is perhaps the kindest unit of the present: big enough to contain a story, small enough that you can still be inside it.

So here is week 25. A boat, a grey ocean, a cold 10K, a phone call to Italy, and a song in a drugstore a few minutes before closing.

A lot can happen in a week.