Rockin' the Suburbs

Write about spending time with a baby or child under the age of two.

It was brief, but this was what came to mind...I was working at the Sony Theater in Somerville in the spring of 1995 when this happened. I was stuck behind the concessions counter one morning, when a young family came up. The mother was holding a toddler and had to put him down for a second or so while she took out her wallet, and I offered to keep an eye out on the kid while she got her stuff together. I forgot exactly what the kid's name was, but it was long and of African descent and I couldn't quite pronounce it correctly, though I gave it the college try, much to the mother's amusement.

After the mother got her stuff ready, she took the toddler back, and in doing so, she caught my nametag, which just had my first name, "Jon". She looked at it for a second, and asked, "How do you pronounce that?"

If anything, that event got me thinking about the meaning and etymology of names, and helped me come up with some interesting ideas for my writing. :)

Many of our fondest memories are associated with food. Describe a memorable experience that took place while preparing or eating food.

Okay, so it's a drink, but close enough. My previous post about seafood got eaten somehow and I don't feel like rewriting it. :p

So why Mountain Dew, as you can see by the shocking green and red logo? Good question. I latched onto it probably sometime in high school, while all my other male classmates were chugging down the nastiness that is Jolt Cola. If I was going to overdose on caffeinated soda, it was going to be one that was also ridiculously sweet.

There was that evening with my friend Donn (yes, the 'knocking on windows' friend) in which we somehow got a hold of a bottle of mint gin (yeah, I don't know either) and mixed it with the Dew. The funny thing is that it tasted really great...for about a minute, and then the aftertaste. Oh GOD the aftertaste was along the lines of "what were we THINKING??" And of course, when you live in a small town with nothing better to do on a summer night, you decide that maybe it'll taste better the next time out. So you drink some more. Not enough to get drunk, but just enough to question our sanity.

But more to the point, I equate the Dew to writing down in my parents' basement. For a good couple of years I would often have one of those long 12-pack cartons of the cans underneath my desk and drink one or two during my nightly three-hour writing sessions. I still think those were some of the best writing sessions I'd had in my life, and I'm pretty sure a lot of it was due to my caffeinated brain running a million miles an hour and hammering out a good thousand or so words a night. Come to think of it, this was in addition to the early morning coffee, the big half-liter bottle I'd have at work.

I of course don't drink it nearly as much as I used to (and my teeth, stomach and brain thank me kindly), but I will still grab a bottle now and again. My writing fuel lately has been water, but if I happen to have a soda on hand, I'll have that.

But it's the Dew that will always be my go-to Writing Fuel. :)

Write about a chance meeting that has stayed with you ever since.

I have to admit I don't speak with him nearly as often as I should, but this question reminded me of my friend Bruce, who I met at Yankee Candle in early 2001. This was just before the then-new YC warehouse opened up the road, and I'd just switched over to first shift a month or so previous. He'd been working over at one of YC's satellite buildings and was visiting my building for a few weeks for a special project. We were both in the shipping department (then called "trafficking", much to everyone's amusement) and were of similar mind--we paid attention to our work, we both realized pallet building is like a giant game of Jenga, and most importantly, we found out we were both musically inclined. He'd been a drummer/percussionist for a local bar band and I've been playing guitar for years; we both listened to a hell of a lot of music (we have wildly diverging tastes, but there's a lot of bleedover too). After a few months on the job, it felt weird to suddenly have another person who got what I was talking about half the time. By the time we moved to the new building in April of 2001, he and I were pretty much best buds and partners in crime. By the end of the year we found a third guy who was into music, and started a band called jeb! (Jon, Eric, Bruce) and jammed off and on for a good couple of years [the subject line is something I ad-libbed to him on one of our songs]. He was also a good soundboard for my writing, as I was working on my trilogy at that point.

I left YC in early 2005 when I moved down to New Jersey (and later to San Francisco), and I know my leaving hit him pretty hard, but we did our best to get together and talk now and again. I try to meet up with him when I'm in Massachusetts and if he's around. Just recently I tranferred all of jeb!'s stuff to mp3 and emailed him one of the tracks. I've been thinking I should reach out to him again (I've been pretty bad at connecting with others who aren't online as much as I am). He's got his own family now (two kids!) and he's no longer at YC either, and we've gone our separate ways, but I have to say it was great hanging with him during those days.

4. Being trapped in a confined environment can turn an ordinary experience into a powder keg. Write about a thing that happened to you while you were using transportation; anything from your first school bus ride, to a train or plane, to being in the backseat of the car on a family road trip.

One of the things I DO NOT MISS being out here in California is driving in the snow. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy certain aspects of winter...a good night on one of those long red plastic sleds, a silly snowball fight, the eerie muted ambient sound during a snowfall, even coming in and having a tasty hot chocolate after a long morning shoveling outside. But I think it was around 2000 or 2001 when driving on snowy roads started making me nervous and twitchy. It wasn't so much that I couldn't drive in snow--thanks to my ridiculously early hours at Yankee Candle, I knew how to navigate roads that hadn't been plowed yet. It was more that I started getting more nervous the others around me who might not be as proficient at it. I didn't want to slide into them, and I certainly didn't want them sliding into me, either.

I can think of two instances where I found myself attempting to get somewhere on snowy roads that shook my nerves. The first one was when I was driving home from HMV during a particularly snowy night. Most of the roads were passable, if not exactly clear at that time, and I was lucky enough not to get stuck or start sliding when I had to make it up an unsanded and partially plowed hill. I'd made it all the way past the Leominster/Fitchburg stretch of Route 2, only to get stuck in an absurdly long line of cars attempting to make it up a slow, curving hill. Many were spinning their tires and doing their damnedest and not getting too far. As luck would have it, I was right near the start of the outer climbing lane, usually reserved for lumbering trucks. To my surprise, no one was in that lane, all the way up the hill. Probably bending a few traffic laws in the process, I said to hell with it, zipped into that lane...and proceeded to climb all the way up that hill at my own speed, with absolutely no problem at all! All told, it took me two hours to get home (it usually took me one on a clear day), but that one moment made it worth it.

The second instance was on one of those stupidly early days at Yankee during fourth quarter, when I had to be there by 4AM--which meant I had to leave my house by 2:30 the latest, so I'd give myself enough time to get there (and time to spare and hang out with my friends). Like the HMV ride, there were a lot of unsanded and somewhat plowed roads, but for the most part I managed it quite well. It wasn't until I was on one of the back roads heading through Montague where it was a long straightaway near the airport, that I had a problem, in the size of an adult male deer. So picture this--I'm driving down a sparsely lit road that's relatively clear but wet with a few snowy patches, and I have one hand on the wheel because I'm about to take a sip of my still-full coffee...when this BIG HONKIN' DEER comes out of nowhere and runs in front of me. I screamed out an "ooooh shiiiiiiIII---", wrenched the wheel to the left and went into the oncoming lane, and managed to speed by the deer without hitting it. As I regained my senses and went back into my own lane...I realized I hadn't spilled one drop of coffee. Suffice it to say, I kept a vigilant eye out on that stretch for the rest of the winter, just to make sure THAT didn't happen again. ;)

This was a hard one. What lie would I talk about? The little white lies we all tell each other to cover our asses in one way or another? One I might have told my parents or teacher as a kid? No, I think the biggest ones are the ones we tell our selves.

I lied to myself quite a bit in the early 90s. That I was happy in college. That my relationships were stable (or at least salvageable). That I could afford to live on the meager pittance I was making. That I had a grasp on my future. That my writing was any good. That things would get better, given time. I lied to myself out of fear, out of denial. I couldn't bear to accept the bitter truths staring me in the face. That wasn't until about 1997, when I did a hell of a lot of soul searching (literally and figuratively) and got my act together.

I still catch myself lying to myself now and again...but I've gotten a hell of a lot better at facing cold truths in the process.

It doesn't take much to make me happy, I'm an easy-going guy. Hand me a plate of Italian food. Bring me to the local sushi boat restaurant. Drop me off at a record store and let me go hog wild. Feed me some chocolate--preferably white or dark, or with cherries inside. Serve me a malted milkshake. Let me spend hours in a bookstore.

And of course, these never fail to make me happy...

( ...and further proving I am five. :) )

Cartoons are always the simplest and the most fun pleasures for me. :)

They said :

"You're just another person in the world
You're just another fool with radical views
You're just another who has maddening views
You want to turn it on its head
By staying in bed !"

I said : "I know I do"
--Morrissey, "He Knows I'd Love to See Him"


I had my own bedroom in the northwest corner of the house until I moved out to college. It was originally a faded pinkish color but in the early 80s my dad and I painted it the typical light blue of a boy's room. It was a relatively small squarish room with baseboard heating along the western side and an odd notch in the southeast corner where the chimney was, and I could only arrange the bed and other furniture in so many ways, so it's pretty much stayed the same way ever since. My older sister has since taken over the room, but you can still see a few telltale things of how I had it set up back then.

The bed was either up against the north wall and facing east, or up against the west wall and facing south. There was a closet in the northeast corner, and next to it was my bureau, and next to that (and up against the old chimney wall) was either a bookcase or a chair or a squat shelf that housed my cassette collection. Those three were pretty much constant. The south wall changed over the years, first from a few bookshelves and whatnot to a desk and a hand-me-down stereo, and lastly a bookshelf that held more cassettes and my radio on the top, and my turntable stereo next to it, on top of an old school desk. In front of the window on the north wall was my desk, once my grandmother's. There was usually nothing in front of the west window that looked out over our back yard, as there wasn't much space for anything there.

I of course think of my old bedroom as my cave, my fortress of solitude, my escape from the rest of the world or sometimes just from the town I grew up in. Once I became a teenager, the walls slowly started getting plastered with music and movie posters, album cover flats, pictures from magazines, and other random things. In 1987 or so my sister bought me an extremely large poster of the Cure which took up most of the west wall. It was obvious then how much of a music geek I was by the things I put up.

The first radio I had in there was an old crackly one that used to be in the kitchen, and was the one I used to discover all the music I would enjoy in the early 80s. In 1984 I got my first radio/cassette player (which I still have), which I then used to make all the mix tapes of things I heard (most of which I also still have). That radio got a lot of use in those years, first parked at my desk while I listened to Top 40 and classic rock, then on my bureau or on my bookcase when I listened to WMDK and the college radio stations. You can still see a strip of tape on the dial where I'd stuck a strip of paper that held notches of where my favorite stations were.

I spent quite a bit of time in that room hanging out by myself, thinking about what I wanted to do when I graduated, and working on my writing and my music. I'd park myself on the bed with notebook in hand and write all sorts of things while music played from one of the radios, or I'd be playing my dad's keyboard or my bass. As I got older I'd also stay up late, listening to music with my headphones, with just a dim lamp next to my bed rather than the bright overhead light. Back then I'd stay up until midnight or one in the morning, even on school nights. I loved the cavelike ambience of that room at that time, when everyone else was asleep. I felt like I was the only one in the world who was still awake. This ambience, along with the pains of being a teenager and the music I was listening to at the time, definitely influenced my writing at the time. I was your typical teenage rebel in his own mind, getting along with everyone but thinking I was a teenage nonconformist. I wrote Cure-like lyrics of anger and depression, weird and strange scenes in my novel, and introspective lines of poetry.

I think it was late 1988 when I pulled my bed apart. I'd had the same woodframe bed since I was a kid, and I'd started to outgrow it, not to mention that the support boards were starting to lose their hold. I took it apart one afternoon and put the mattress and boxspring down on the floor. The funny thing was that my parents didn't notice it until about a week or so later. My mom was concerned that I'd be cold, but considering my bed was right next to the heater, it would keep me warm enough. I even kept the bed made during the day, folding the comforter so it just touched the floor. It was another personal touch to the room that set it far apart from all the other rooms in the house.

Moving out of that room when I headed to college was kind of exciting and sad at the same time. I was looking forward to heading out into the world and making something of myself, but at the same time I was losing something deeply personal that I would never get back in the same way again. I would still create my own personal spaces in a succession of apartments and even when I moved back home, but it wouldn't be the same. I'd moved on and grown up.

Sometimes I kind of miss having that personal cave, even though I now have my writing nook in our spare bedroom (aka 'Spare Oom'). My old bedroom was a place for meditation and rest, and a place to hide from the rest of the world when things got too frustrating or overwhelming. We're all so plugged in to the internet and distracted with the rest of the world that I sometimes forget I can still do that.

It's hard for me to think of myself as a grownup, because not only am I the youngest in my family, but I'm also the youngest in my family's generation, so I'm always thought of as "the baby in the family." Not to mention that even at 41, I enjoy being the silly comic relief. I still watch cartoons, and well-performed slapstick still makes me laugh. I still make bad puns and laugh at bathroom humor. To this day I still don't often consciously think of myself as a grown up, even when I do lapse into the occasional 'get off my lawn' rant.

I think one of the first times I realized I was a grown up was the summer of 1995, two years after I graduated from college. I pick that time, because it was the point where 'Where I Want to Be' was nowhere near 'Where I Really Am' in terms of starting said Real Life. While my college friends had gone out to southern California to start a career in film or acting or had started their writing or radio careers here and there (I went to Emerson in Boston, where these are majors), I was stuck in neutral, working at dead-end jobs, and had no real idea what I really should be doing. I was seriously in debt from credit cards and student loans. I was working at a dead-end job and never had enough money. I stayed up way too late and slept too little. I was in a relationship that was not healthy for either of us. I'd lost touch with pretty much everyone from college and elsewhere, and I was too broke to be able to call them. Keep in mind, this was before the internet was ubiquitous (it was the time of AOL, which I had briefly, but again--too broke to keep it), so it wasn't as if I could email or tweet someone. This was also during the mid-90s when trying to find a decent job was getting hard as hell to find.

That August, I'd made an extremely tough decision, after all my plans for staying in Boston fell apart: I moved back in with my parents.

On the other hand, it was probably the smartest move I'd ever made. Not that I really knew it at the time, because I was angry at my own failure and my rising debt, but it also put me in a position to seriously think about what I was doing wrong and how I could fix it. I could have easily fallen into a depression, gone jobless and listless, but I didn't. I didn't want to put my family through that. I gave myself a month to get this anger and failure out of my system and do a bit of soul searching.

I had to decide, once and for all, what I was going to do for the rest of my life as a career. I knew it wasn't going to be an office job, or a factory job, or anything like that. Not that I saw myself above such positions, of course...it was that I saw them as "the paycheck." The career was what I truly wanted to do, and would love doing until or if I retired.

And every time I thought about it, I came back to the same conclusion. I'm a writer.

I went through a succession of 'paycheck' jobs at a movie theater, a radio station, a bank, a record store, and a candle warehouse, while I lived with my parents. I of course did what was asked of me in these positions, and I never slacked off at them, but from the the spring of 1996 onwards, I did my damnedest to write something every day. I wrote poetry to get the lingering depression and anger out of my system. I wrote bits of scenes and story ideas that were never expanded upon just to get the flow going. I picked up older stories to see if I could expand on them. And I started reading all kinds of things--genre fiction, history, music bios, anything that looked remotely interesting when I started making my frequent weekend trips to various New England bookstores. By the end of 1996, I had the start of a new novel, and my first science fiction story. I'd never written in genre before. That novel would be rewritten a few years later and become a trilogy, which I am currently revising for submission.

If anything, I grew the hell up when I was humbled out of being a kid, and I think that was probably the best thing that had ever happened to me.


I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd / but when they said, "Sit down," I stood up / Ooh... growin' up -- "Growin' Up", Bruce Springsteen

Q: Who are you?

Light-Hearted A: I'm a somewhat obsessive music collector geek, so the following song lyrics may or may not apply as an answer, but at least they explain my varied taste in music:

--I want to be a paperback writer.
--I am the very model of a modern major general.
--Who-who, who-who.
--I've got the music in me.
--Aircraft adorn my hair, small boats adhere to my feet.
--I'm not the man I used to be.
--Call me morbid, call me pale.
--I'm not as sad as Dostoevsky, I'm not as clever as Mark Twain.
--I'm just sitting here, watching the wheels go round and round.
--I want you to want me.
--No one I think is in my tree.
--I'm not your stepping stone.
--I am a sensitive artist.
--I'm a jack of all trades, we'll be all right.
--It's not me talking.

More Serious A: I'm a writer, musician, artist, music collector, husband, son, brother, coworker, part French Canadian and part Irish, comic relief, onomatopoeist, blogger, and other things, hopefully adequately. None of this is professional as of yet, though I'd like to change that for at least one of the above.


For all he Scintilla readers: I do a lot of self-reflection on this here LJ, a lot of it about music and/or writing, so if you're interested, feel free to read! Welcome to RTS! :)