Category Archives: Writing

I Quit My Job to Write

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Last month I quit my job of 12 years, without another job to go to. I quit so I could write.
While it’s still fresh in my mind, I want to set down for myself, if for no one else, how exactly I came to do it. Just a few months or years, to say nothing of the possible doubts or second thoughts that might arise, could begin to smudge what was once clear and imperative.
I must write. I must do it every day. I must work hard at it, with all my soul, and be the best that I can be. I made this change openly so that I could not easily turn back, so that my friends would ask me what I was working on, and I would need to answer them.
I have to make the time. I have to get out onto the page what is in the pains of labor to be born. I must not, should I be blessed with twenty or thirty more years, bear as an old man the attending regret of never having given myself the time and space needed to make a committed endeavor of writing – of wishing I had, but never having been willing to take the necessary risks of missteps, rejection, criticism and failure. I no longer fear these as much as I fear that regret for having avoided the risks and kept my gift locked away.
But how did I come to this resolve, and why did it take so long? That is what I want to put down now, before it fades.
I had wanted to leave my job for some time, six or seven years at least, but not with very much intensity. It was a small academic community for which I had lasting love and loyalty. But I was stuck in a job I didn’t love, although I didn’t hate it, either. All my attempts to find a different job at the college or elsewhere, or to change the job I had, were frustrated. But my biggest career obstacle was not having a career. Toward that end I considered graduate school in a related field. I attended seminary for a year. But I never uncovered a clear path. I knew I wanted to depart, but I didn’t know where I wanted to go.
In the last two years I turned 50, saw a couple of doors close at work, and took a 60-day trip across Europe with my wife.
Before I left I had written my first polished essay, and I decided that when we returned I would try to get it published. By that time I had already made up my mind time was a crucial issue for me. I wrote to myself:

I’ve come to accept an obvious but unwelcome realization about what I want to do with last third of my life, which is to write: I’ve never been able to write in my spare time, and I never will. That is because after dressing, commuting, working and seeing to all the other demands on my time, it turns out that my spare time is where I live my life. My leftover time is my life. So, I have a stark choice: write or live.
My life consists in the real living that I do every week, spending time with my family, with my friends, at church, walking, eating, sleeping, praying, reading. My life is not always easy, but it is pretty simple, and I like it that way.
But I want to write, and I don’t consider that living time is the obstacle. What I consider life – friendship and love and connecting with God and people and the creation – these are not the thieves, and they are not the things I want to sacrifice in order to write. No, I’m looking at the other side of my time – the job, the time it takes me to go to and fro, the 48 hours of my week – as the real thief. And I want to grab hold of it like I would a Neapolitan pickpocket, grip it by the wrist and jerk, and I mean jerk it back. It’s my time, and I’ll wrestle him to the ground to get it back. It’s this guy, not my life and my love that’s the problem.

While traveling in Italy, Spain, France and the UK, I was carried along by wave after wave of inspiration. A feast of natural, artistic and architectural beauty greeted us everywhere, every day. I had half a dozen ideas for new essays. At Dove Cottage I saw William Wordsworth sitting at the edge of Grasmere Lake, composing verses in his head. The lakes and ancient forests, the Holy Isles, the ruined abbeys, the Florentine tower, the great walled city of the Cathars, the Alhambra, the Alps, the Appian Way, all made me want to write – like Wordsworth, who walked in the morning from his doorstep to the bank on the shore and wrote without pen or paper.

THE sylvan slopes with corn-clad fields
Are hung, as if with golden shields,
Bright trophies of the sun!
Like a fair sister of the sky,
Unruffled doth the blue lake lie,
The mountains looking on.

People like Wordsworth, and Shakespeare, and Dali and Michelangelo, who had left their enduring and indelible marks on the world – marks we saw and were awed by and rejoice in – they had not given of themselves merely a portion of their time and passion to create what they did. They had gone all in.
And I was, etymologically speaking, breathed into: inspired.
When we returned home I was even more convinced I could not stay at my job, that I could not turn 60 there. I didn’t know how, but I had to carve out some time to write, to drop the 270 miles a week of commuting, and do something different and closer to home. I would have to leave. We had agreed that after Laura found a full-time job, I would once again look for a different job. As we considered our financial situation, it occurred to us that if I worked part time and she full time, we would be no worse off than when our situations had been reversed the previous five years.
I applied for part-time library jobs. My hope was to quit before the beginning of another academic year. And my goal was to get my essay published before I gave my notice.

I wrote my first story when I was about eight. It concerned a boy who was transparently me, who got his dearest wish. The end.
I think my grandparents had gone to Florida, and brought back a board game for me and my siblings, but I was the only one who really took an interest in it. Some assembly was required and I put it together. I don’t recall ever actually playing the game, but that was quite all right. It was called A Visit to Walt Disney World, and on the box cover Mickey and Donald stand over a picture of the theme park. Once constructed, it was a paper and cardboard version of the Magic Kingdom, which promised “a world of fun:” the castle, with fireworks, the haunted mansion, a spinning teacup ride, and best of all a monorail on the wall that surrounded the board, with paper cars that slid atop the walls.
I thought about the real monorail, and Tomorrowland, Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, the go-carts, the Enchanted Tiki Room. This paper world came alive in my imagination. I knew there was no point in asking my parents if we could go to this magical place, because we could not. Instead I invented a story in my mind about a boy, much like myself, whose parents surprise him with the announcement that the family is going to Disney World!
I was quite happy with the two or three hundred words I’d written, and showed it to my parents and some other adults. I believe they all took it as more of a broad hint than a story, which was quite understandable. But there was something more. I felt a satisfaction that came from giving expression to my wish; it didn’t have to come true. The story made me happy as a story because it had my own feelings in it, real feelings of longing, anticipation, and attainment. It was enough. That story served and satisfied myself, but only a few years later, I saw how stories served and satisfied the reader; that good stories were a gift.

That was 45 years ago. I have been bothered by the fact that even though I returned time and again to writing, for different reasons and in different genres, I never gave myself permission to call myself a writer until I got paid to do it, and I never let myself believe I could write creatively in my own voice. I never gave myself completely to it. I lied to myself or let myself be lied to. It was such an obvious and hateful lie. Why did I listen to whatever it was in me that was always decreeing what I was incapable of doing?
I loved writing when my friends and I made our own newspaper in fourth grade. I loved writing as a student journalist and columnist in high school and college. I began writing poetry and experimental prose in high school as well. Later, and for twenty years, I planned and wrote mostly unfinished screenplays, which no one ever saw. At 20 I began a novel, which I abandoned. In college, I first struggled with but came to shine in the assigned essays I wrote. I wrote scripts for an audio book and a PSA. I wrote training materials and curricula. Eventually, a friend invited me to join a dot-com startup as their marketing and web writer. It was the best job I ever had. It lasted 14 months until the company moved to San Francisco and left most of us behind.
How could I have missed that writing was my gift and my love? It may have been a dismissal based on the ubiquitous axiom that one cannot make a living at it, and therefore, it is not worth one’s time or effort. It was also the pull of my competing interests. And deep beneath was a crippling doubt about my own voice, the one that doesn’t hide behind newsprint or format or objectivity. The real me that lived in my poems, and the stories and ideas I couldn’t figure how to write.
On the other hand, I did figure out how to put myself into words, and I did come to this resolve, however late in life, at the time when I was ready – and not before. Those years were not wasted, they were lived. Every day went to making to making me a writer, because in many ways I was always thinking like a writer, writing in my head, always germinating ideas. I am affirming myself as a writer at the only time I could have, and it likely could not have happened sooner than now. I’ve made peace with that, and I am willing to forgive myself my previous denials.
Four years ago I was writing a series of posts (starting here) on this blog that set me on the path to finding my voice. I had begun a couple of years before, but the real change came in 2012, when I read Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write. Nothing I have read has given me more encouragement and motivation to write. I had been telling stories from my life, that were organized around themes rather than periods of time or single episodes. But I put little effort into the style, adopting a casual tone that mixed fairly straightforward voice with occasional experiments. The stories were interesting enough on their own, I thought, and I was driven by the urge to tell them, not necessarily to create excellent prose. The results were pieces I sometimes didn’t even want to read when they were done. But I was making progress.
Ueland believed that anyone could write well if they wrote from their hearts, from their authentic selves. I was challenged to write what I saw, what I felt, what I thought because it is one’s personal outlook that gives their words real value: by writing what only they and no one else can. Turning to my life stories, I attempted to dig a little deeper into the emotional terrain and find the language that could recreate my sensations and feelings on the page. I felt I was getting a little closer to the voice of my heart.
Early the next year I wrote an essay that brought me all the way home. I wrote about something deeply important and emotionally painful for me, and I sang with the voice I had been looking for, that came as close as I had ever come to capturing and projecting the real me. I felt I had nailed it, not because it was so good, but because it was so me.
This was the piece I submitted for publication last year. As I submitted it to the first four publications, all literary journals, I was prepared for a period of rejections. I was unknown and unpublished, after all. I shortly received my first rejection, from a prestigious journal that was admittedly a longer-than-usual shot. Then I received an acceptance, from a well-established online journal. I was delighted and surprised: after only one rejection my first-ever literary submission was scheduled to be published. It had been my goal to secure an acceptance before I quit my job. Three months after it was published I gave notice of my departure. I wondered if a few people who know me might not understand or approve of this change. It’s all right. They’ve had their say; I’ve been heeding their voices in one form or another most of my life.

Now I work part time – at a library, where I’ve always belonged – and I am free to write every day. And to this amazing privilege, there has attached an obligation – to create, to bear fruit in due season. But it is a happy obligation, one I accept easily because of its utter weightlessness. It is not something I carry, but which carries me.

Laugh Your Life | Part Two

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Kick over the wall ’cause government’s to fall
How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour, anger can be power
D’you know that you can use it?
-Strummer/Jones
Clampdown

Free Radical
Situated with my friends, with a job and nice apartment in Ballard, I wanted to do more than work and watch movies. First,  I wanted to find and join some leftist activists. In particular, I wanted get involved in the No Nukes/antiwar movement. Somehow I was dissuaded. I became disenchanted by the prospect, or distracted, somehow. I only remember two small incidents; I can’t help thinking there must have been something more that I can’t recall. On May 3rd, there was a huge anti-war rally, and all three of us went to it.

Seattle Rally May 3 1981

At the rally, I talked with a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, the same group that had been at the center of a melee I was in the day before at First and Pike.The RCP’s stated goal: the violent overthrow of the US government by the end of the 80s. I wasn’t a communist, but I was certainly leaning toward socialism and was adopting an anti-capitalist attitude that made me at least somewhat sympathetic to ‘mainstream’ communists.  But the RCP’s  program of violence, even civil war, elicited no such sympathy. As my thinking became more radical with regard to change, I also was beginning to see the further one moved from the center, the less freedom was valued. The radical, the ideologue, far enough to the left or to the right, is no friend of the Bill of Rights. Those rights stand in the way of burning down the City and remaking it according to the Perfect Plan. My opposition to violence and basic belief in the Bill of Rights wasn’t going to make me a very good radical.

“Let me ask you something,” I said to him. “You want to take over the government. Make a new constitution.”

“Yes.”

“What’s your position on freedom of religion?”

He hemmed and hawed. “Well,” he said cautiously, “religion is one of the major problems in the current power structure.”

“People in this country wouldn’t  have religious freedom under your regime, would they?”

“No.”

That means forced renunciations or – for those won’t – prison, re-education, death.

“That’s what I thought.”

Turning away, I said to Troy, “At least he’s honest.”

I was thinking, Crap, I’m marching in the same rally with this goon. Someone who’d put a bullet through the head of everyone in my family, if he had the power.

It’s funny. That was a conversation that could just as likely have taken place in 1969. As in Missoula, there was this subculture frozen in time, as if Nixon were still president and bombing Cambodia, and J.Edgar Hoover was spying on them. The world was changing around them and the agents of change had parked themselves in a timeless echo chamber, with street theatre puppets, Grateful Dead concerts and Marxist dogma.

Around that time, I went to the office of the historic underground newspaper, Northwest Passage. I told a guy there my newspaper background and said I’d like to help out. Without showing the least interest, he said maybe I could help with production. I could check back later and he offered a time I could do so.

“Actually, I’m interested in writing, too.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve got plenty of writers.”

I went back and worked an evening on production, although I don’t remember it; I just havenorthwest_blog_pic2 crop letter that says so. In it I also say that all three of us wanted to work there in the fall. We never did, though. I suspect I didn’t really believe that I would get the opportunity to write. Even though the paper was known for accepting articles from readers, and getting a lot of submissions, now I got the impression they had more than they needed.

By themselves, I don’t think either of these events dissuaded me from activism. Perhaps they damped my enthusiasm, though. At 16 I had been welcomed warmly by the small cadre of peace activists at the University of Montana, even though all I had to contribute was my enthusiasm and commitment. But Seattle had thousands of activists, splintered into their little constituencies, none of whom, I thought, would care that I wanted to write for their cause. That’s what most of them were already doing themselves.

That's right: Katherine Hepburn. Letter to Dad & Jane.

That’s right: Katherine Hepburn. Letter to Dad & Jane.

Another factor was the anger and pessimism I sensed. Perhaps I was projecting, but for a town that was firmly of the left, where they held political power and cultural dominance, Ronald Reagan really had a lot of folks in a lather. Things seemed pretty rotten, I suppose, if your goal in life was turning America into one big petroleum-free food co-op with no national defense.

But not so bad if you concentrated on the positive, like getting high and doing The Pogo.

Prior Engagement
My interest in writing wasn’t in any way diminished, and I have a note recording my first serious thought about filmmaking. On April 22, Mark and I had a conversation about writing and making a film. I got very excited about the idea, but I had no idea what it would involve.

April 1981

April 1981

That conversation never developed into a script or anything beyond. But it was the impetus for me to start some screenwriting, which I believe I first put my hand to in the fall. What’s most interesting about my note is that I immediately worried that if we went forward with such an idea (making a film), it could scuttle or delay our Europe plan, and interfere with my seeing Anna. I was trying to stay focused, but having such a hard time!

Mark and Troy both knew that regardless of what I was doing in Seattle, come summer I was going back to Missoula. Classes let out at Cornell, and Anna would be returning on Memorial Day weekend. At some point though, Mark decided he was coming back for the summer as well. Troy and I didn’t care for the idea. We thought it might be hard to make ends meet, especially if we didn’t land summer jobs as we hoped. But he wanted to go, and felt sure he could at least get some work from his mom.

We returned to Missoula on May 28th. Our manager at the King Cinema said we could have our jobs when we came back. She probably couldn’t have promised it, but we did go back to work there when we returned to Seattle.

We had been in Seattle for only little over three months. Already it looked as if our plans had little hope of success. Our earnings did not exceeded our expenses, and our whole plan depended on saving money. Beside that, without any of us knowing it, our resolve was so precarious that only one change of circumstance would be enough to chuck the whole idea aside: something like a falling out, or a girlfriend or another idea.

A better idea.

Friends for Life

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I have been writing for almost a year about a time of my life when the two most important people were my best friends, Troy and Mark. Both of these friendships have hit shoals at times, and looked like they were sunk. But 33 years later, they are not. The two guys I met at Hellgate High School when I was 16 years old are still my friends. I trust they always will be.

I want to say this because what I am publishing in the next months might cause a reader to wonder. So I want to say at the outset that I love my friends and I am grateful for all the times we shared, good and bad.

I first talked with Troy my freshman year, in the spring of 1979. I walked into the Lance office, where Troy served as the news editor, and told him Todd Hess, the student body president, had agreed to create a new office, that of school historian, and I had been named to the post. Instead of laughing at me, Troy told me to sit down. He took out a steno pad and asked me a few questions and made notes of my answers. Then I left. I’m guessing that’s when Troy laughed. Really, I didn’t want or expect an article. I wanted a look at the newspaper office. I wanted to work there.

In the fall I met Troy again. He was now editor-in-chief and I was student in Journalism 1, the prerequisite to serving on the staff. Over the course of the fall, I found myself with new friends, all in J1 or on the staff, including Troy. One new friend was J1 classmate Dave Larson. In the winter, 1979-80, I became acquainted with Mark, Dave’s close friend. Mark already knew Troy from a class or two they had together. I also remember the first conversation I had with Mark. In the hall outside the Lance office, I was telling Dave I thought taking acid was out of the question for me. Everything I had heard about it freaked me out. It was scary and dangerous. You could lose your mind, jump out of a window. Mark chimed in, telling me that it wasn’t dangerous if it was clean, i.e. not laced with other drugs or contaminants. The acid generally available in Missoula was clean. I should think about it. I wasn’t convinced, but I did think about it.

That may seem a little shocking, especially to readers who are too young to remember when drugs of every kind were ubiquitous in the schools and on the streets. We could get pretty much anything we wanted, and I mean anything. Yes, many of my friends and I used drugs. It was as commonplace as teenage drinking and more common than teen pregnancy. Teenage drug use in the US reached its peak at that time. It was a different day, before Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say No’ campaign. So it wasn’t that strange that I would stand in the hallway of our school talking about dropping acid like it was a new diet. Nor was it strange that the person putting in a good word for it would become one of my best friends.

Now the three of us knew each other, and six months later we were fast friends. We formed the Alliance, moved to Seattle, hitchhiked thousands of miles, landed in Midwestern cities far from home, got married, had kids, had our estrangements and reunions, fought and argued and laughed and lived through some real adventures together. Now we all live out west again, and Mark and I are only miles apart.

X Ray Specs Ad 1973 cropI find it hard to explain how our friendship formed, other than to state the obvious: we liked each other. We were not the same, though in some ways we were, but I think we liked the ways we were different, and over time we changed owing to our friendship. Also, we were willing to conceive our idiot plans, convince one another of their merits, and proceed as if they made perfect sense. Or: we were willing to go along with them even if they amounted to the conceptual equivalent of X-Ray Specs: Yeah, they probably won’t work, but wouldn’t be cool if they did? Order me some!

I feel like we’re army buddies. Not war buddies, but friends for life on account of having huddled together for a night, homeless and hungry in a Tornado Alley thunderstorm – and having known each other for just as long as we’ve known ourselves.

Keep in mind, if you should read these posts, nothing is meant to disparage my friends. Yes, we were all fools, and fools together. We’re all agreed on that. Yet our folly was shared, and we seemed to have grown from our common experiences. As I see it, there is not blame; more, there is amazement that we came out alive and still friends. All, I believe, is forgiven if not forgotten. But I am recalling these long-ago stories knowing that my memory is not always accurate, but hoping that what I write is true to the recollections I now have, and what my experiences meant to me then. I hope it is also true to our friendship, which means more to me than anything I might write.

In writing this out, Mark and Troy have given me their permission, without knowing what I was going to write. They put a lot of trust in me. I hope, while being as honest as I should be, to not make them regret it.

school days with steve albini. part four.

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Little things can turn out to be important. You read an article or meet someone at a party or pick up an old book or hear a song. Someone offers the merest kind word when you’re down, or an everyday encounter opens your eyes to suffering in others. You change your mind, or your major, or your priorities; open your heart, your wallet, your home; take a chance, take a look at yourself or the world differently, take a small measure of confidence or courage or new interest — and you’re not the same.

This is in part why I am writing these pieces, and many to follow. I feel considerable gratitude for a great number of small things, especially in my youth, that turned out to be gifts in one way or another – even when I didn’t see them that way at the time. They turned out to matter. This includes the little things I received from the people I see every day, as well as the people I knew growing up. It includes a guy I knew more than thirty years ago named Steve Albini.

#4 Share your talent and encourage others.

Steve was one of those people I knew from time to time growing up who completely baffled me: they were good at stuff.

I wasn’t good at stuff. Or at least I was pretty convinced I wasn’t.

But Steve. For crying out loud. Steve was good at a lot of stuff. The longer I knew him, the more stuff I realized he could do, and he acquitted himself fairly at all of them, and some of them he was, as I say, actually good at. At least in my youthful eyes he was.

The first time I saw Steve was in the fall of 1978, my freshman year. Steve played Snoopy in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. His performance, energetic, gymnastic and funny, was the highlight of the show. Good at comic acting: check.

As Snoopy, 1978

The first time I spoke with Steve was at in the summer of 1979 at the Western Montana State Fair. I already knew him as the editorial page editor for the Hellgate newspaper, the Lance – and as Snoopy – but hadn’t met him. By this time Steve was the guy, more than any other, who impressed me with his obvious talent and iconoclastic attitude. I was thinking, “This guy is something else. I should meet him.”

At the fair he was manning a booth for the photo store he worked at. Among the matted prints on display were a few he had taken. At least one of them later showed up in the school literary magazine, the Troubadour. Good at photography: check.

I engaged him about music, since he wrote surprisingly strong opinions in his song reviews. I thought I’d ask about the singer who was currently my favorite.

“What do you think of Billy Joel?”

“Not bad for a barroom singer.” End of conversation. That’s the problem hanging around an iconoclast: sooner or later your icon is clast.

Good at forming strong opinions on most everything: check.

The next time I had a meaningful encounter with Steve was in the fall, after I had started Journalism 1 in the classroom adjacent to the Lance office. At that time the juniors and seniors who made up the staff were still deciding which of the J1 students they could stand being around. The jury was still out on me.

I was sitting in the cafeteria one day, when an assemblage of ruffians grabbed Steve and duct-taped him into a chair. They wrapped tape around his torso and arms and the back of the chair, and taped is legs to the legs of the chair. It was obviously a preplanned attack. They all had a good laugh and walked away. I stood up and walked toward him. He was helpless, and had been left in the middle of the walkway just inside one of the entrances. In other words, people had to walk around him, and they did. To my amazement, nobody helped him.

This was was all due to Steve’s unpopularity throughout the school. And that was due mostly to one column he wrote: a review of a Boston concert, possibly the most popular concert  among teens in Missoula the whole time we were in high school. Steve wrote that the show was was boring, which infuriated Hellgate students who had attended it, and the Lance received angry letters about it for months. Good at arousing anger in mass numbers: check. Good at self defense: no.

Troy Deckert, Lance editor and Steve’s friend, went for help or scissors or something, leaving Steve alone. I walked over to Steve and said, “Want some help?”

“Sure.” He said nothing while I untaped him.

“Thanks,” he said, and walked away.

* * *

The Lance staff, and to lesser degree, J1, were seen by outside students as something of a clique. We denied it, but it was partially true: there was a clique within the journalism classes. I perceived there was an inner circle on the staff, that Steve was in it, and I wanted in. I was hoping to make a good impression.

There was a wall between the office and the classroom. It divided J1 and J2. There were two possible ways for me to get noticed. From the start of the year, we were required to submit critiques of every issue of the Lance. We turned in each issue of the paper, marked up with our comments and corrections. I decided to announce my arrival with my first critique: I filled very bit of white space in the margins and gutters with my somewhat surreal or goofy humor, and some stream-of-consciousness ramblings mostly unrelated to the paper. I drew little cartoons. It was weird. It was me.

The second way to get noticed came later in the year, when we started submitting our assignments for possible publication. But that would have to wait. When our first critiques had been seen by the staff, they were handed back to us. Mine had a note to Mr. Seitz stapled to it.

“Of all the critiques I saw, this is the only one that showed any creativity or original thought. I look forward to seeing what he can contribute. Steve”

That was exactly what I was hoping for, but I didn’t expect to hear back. That it came from Steve elated me.

* * *

It was Steve’s senior year. In the summer he went to Boy’s State. He was on the Lance, in Drama Club, Student Senate, and Model United Nations; contributed poetry and fiction and photos to the Troubadour; scored as a National Merit Semi-Finalist and was in the Top Twenty of his class. I once saw a research paper he wrote lying around the Lance office. It looked to me like college work. On top of all this, someone in a car smashed his leg when he was on his motorcycle, and he started a punk band. Good at looking good on college applications: check. Time management: check. Making the best of what were probably the worst four years of his life: check.

Unpublished cartoon from Steve’s notebook.

Steve now had a different position on the Lance staff, that of In-Depth Editor. Karen Moulding had taken over as Editorial Page Editor. I think this was a position created for (or by) Steve to give him the latitude to use his eclectic writing and drawing talent. Seriously, Steve was good at everything he did on the paper. He wrote music reviews, in-depth reporting (I especially remember a two-page spread he did on teen suicide), a regular column, and drew cartoons. He called his column Paparazzo. While the term paparazzi had entered the English language, it was not as widely known as it became in the 80s.

“What does Paparazzo mean?” I asked.

He replied, “It’s Italian for an annoying buzzing insect.”

“Oh,” I said, “that’s you.”

I submitted some humor columns, before I had a staff position, under the title Guinea Pig Bones, which derived from a song a friend of mine made up when I was probably ten or eleven. But I decided on a self-referential name like Steve’s and changed it to Nowhere Man.

Toward the end of the school year, J1 students applied for the staff positions they wanted the following year, with a first, second and third choice. I can only remember my first: Editorial Page Editor. The graduating seniors on staff would decide in a closed meeting on staff assignments. My friend Dave Larson, a junior, and I were selected as co-editors of the editorial pages. I was interested in three things: I wanted to write lead editorials and my Nowhere Man column, and draw cartoons.

As the year progressed and I put some of my endeavors forward, my confidence as a writer was developing. But as a cartoonist, I knew I had severe limitations. Steve gave me some basic pointers. He talked to me about pens, what to use for what, how to hold them when drawing. He gave me the idea of using brushes as well. He suggested I use better paper than the typing paper from school I was using. He told me I should practice tone-building patterns (such as cross-hatching) and gave me a sheet with with different patterns to try. Last of all he gave me a couple of books on cartooning technique. One of them was excellent and I kept it for years. I wish I still had it; I’ve never found one that matched it.

I was never a great cartoonist, (in fact, if hurried, my drawing was awful) but all of these things made a noticeable improvement in my drawing and gave me confidence to try new things. I had always been a doodler, and especially liked to make my friends laugh with funny pictures. But I had never gotten more satisfaction from it than I did when I started to do it with a little more skill and assurance.

This was also the first time that I found myself getting anywhere through practice. I quit wrestling during my second season in part because I was defeated in every match but one and wasn’t improving. I started that year with next to zero self-confidence in anything I did. At the same time J1 was pointing me to some stuff I might be good at. Working at something – like drawing or writing – and getting better at it was a small revelation to me.

Steve Albini had talent. But not everyone who has talent develops it and exhibits what they can do in a way that others can see and enjoy and criticize. Some people certainly thought Steve, like a lot of us when we were young, just wanted attention, negative or otherwise. But I don’t think that’s fair. Hellgate High School, like every other, was a hive of teenagers, and who would blame anybody for just hiding out for four years, rather than expose oneself to the hormonal mob? Steve was Steve. Steve was a writer of in-depth reporting, opinion, poetry, short stories and songs. Steve was a photographer, an artist, an actor, a raconteur*, a scholar and a punk rocker. He was being himself. He didn’t hide. Me, I was going to hide, but Steve is the person who gave me the idea of not hiding out for four years, so I didn’t.

(Since then he has shown himself good at other stuff: recording records, giving interviews, poker and cooking, to name just a few.)

Understand, this is not gushing over him. He wasn’t Leonardo da Vinci. He wasn’t my hero, or even a role model. However it does help to explain why I remember so much about him, and why I still appreciate what he meant to me at the time.

* * *

There were times I was annoying or obnoxious. Steve too. There was a time or two I got mad at Steve, and I know I got on his nerves occasionally, but I did consider him a friend. We had a more than a dozen friends in common. We went to a lot of the same parties. We went to see some shows together, including Cheap Trick. I remember sitting next to him when a bunch of us went to see Quadrophenia, and Steve having to explain to me the setting of the movie. We went to The Rocky Horror Picture Show a half-dozen times. On top of that, there were the little gestures I just described. And there are a few other episodes better left unpublished.

But the real mark of friendship in my mind is the Friday night at the beginning of summer that Steve called me up to go catch a movie. He picked me up, we went and saw, from start to finish, one of the most pestilent and egregious movies of all time, and afterward he dropped me home. I suppose it was friendship, or companionship at least — or perhaps it was really just the boredom you experience living in a small Rocky Mountain town while deep in your core the Windy City and the Crash of a Thousand Guitars is calling you by name.

Maybe knowing what the movie was will provide a clue.


part one.   part two.    part three.
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*Steve can tell a story, and otherwise verbally engross an audience. To watch a video that perfectly captures his style, then and now, go here.