Coincidence? Not really. I've lived lots of my life in accordance with Who lines.

"Out of my brain on the 5:15 [train]," one line goes. On July 17, I was out of my brain when tickets went on sale for the band's world tour U.S. opener this coming Tuesday night at the Wachovia Center. Because I was coaching a baseball camp, I couldn't camp out for tickets —and that's why I couldn't sleep.

When a second Philly show (Nov. 25) was announced, stubbornly, I decided I wasn't standing in line for tickets, or ordering online. Plus, at 41, who do you even ask to go? Old high school friends? Do you shamelessly let your workplace know you still have leftover adolescent angst?

Music is deeply personal, but I mentioned The Who to one friend who is a decade older than me. She instantly rewound: She was 13, at figure skating camp in 1969, and between sessions the girls smoked cigarettes and listed to Tommy, a then-debut rock opera about a psychedelic pinball wizard.

The infatuation, she reports, lasted all year.

When I was 13, drummer Keith Moon died from a drug overdose, but The Who became my drug. The lyrics offered advice I couldn't find elsewhere. The songs defined my adolescent soul-searching and justified my confusion and rebellion. Songs like "The Real Me," "Who Are You?" and "I'm One" championed a reaffirmation we crave in music.

Under my senior year high school yearbook picture, there's a line from Quadrophenia's "I've Had Enough": "Strike out to reach a mountain. Be so nice on the outside, but inside keep ambition." For graduation, one friend cut up his first-edition The Who: Maximum R & B book to make me a collage of Pete Townshend, the band's creative composer and relentless artistic experimenter.

Two years later, I was in a sea of 90,000 when The Who played Live Aid July 13, 1985 at JFK Stadium. I've seen Townshend every time he's toured solo, and even now-deceased bassist John Entwistle alone in Chicago. I once conned my dad into Philly's then-Chestnut Cabaret (I was underage) for Simon Townshend, Pete's younger brother, before he joined The Who.

I have decades of albums, posters, photos and ticket stubs, but it was a letter I wrote Townshend between high school and college — and his personal response — that solidified my earliest days, not as a fan, but as a journalist, never Pete's favorite blokes. Naive, yet brazen, I proposed writing his authorized biography. His poignant nonconsent didn't matter; Pete wrote back. He was as real as his music, and his response forever cured my fear of asking questions, no matter how unimaginable.

Mostly, I've considered Townshend, now 61, a storyteller. His unceasing intellect and artistic adventure continue at www.petetownshend.com where he posts a diary and new work, including The Boy Who Heard Music, a novella. Yeah, a fucking novella by a rock musician.

In a Sept. 3 entry filed the day before heading here, he defined rock music as "a process" like "breathing, exploding, imploding, climbing a stairway to a door made from a mirror."

Yes, forever reflective: Relisten to those 1960s and '70s rock operas about Tommy and Jimmy, or read his Horse's Neck (1985), an impressionistic collection of autobiographical fiction, or revisit the groundbreaking radio play Psychoderelict (1993). In each, you'll find plenty of story for any generation.

I, too, am a storyteller —in part, thanks to Townshend —and with word of his latest reunion with Roger Daltrey, I reopened my files. I'm writing that biography, although unauthorized. I wasn't afraid to ask for a credential into Tuesday's show either, although I'm still waiting on word from the band's publicist.

I won't sleep until it's confirmed.