Oh, man.

 

With the advent of Facebook and Twitter and Classmates.com, I've recently begun re-establishing relationships with people I haven't seen in a long time.  This is nice, by and large.

 

The major drawback is that most people don't live my life of intrigue, danger, wild career/relationship/residence changes, or the occasional year-long blackout due to head injuries.  So when you ask those people, "Wow, so what have you been up to," they invariably respond, "Well, after college, I started working at Yardstick and Gullwing as an account rep, then Rick and I got married, and we bought a house on South Hill, and now we have three kids and a cat," or similar.

 

Which is all well and good, as far as that goes.  I hope these people are happy, and I'm genuinely happy for them.  If it wasn't for sane people with steady jobs, I wouldn't be able to lead my happy immature life down here on the poverty line.  Hell, somebody's got to make the Nintendo Wiis and distill the whiskey and, oh, I don't know, whatever it is the grownups get up to. 

 

But these people, after summing up a quarter-century or more in one sentence, always do the polite thing and turn the question back on me: "So, what have you been up to?"

 

Jeez.  You know, half the time I'm having too much fun to worry about what I'm doing, and the rest of the time if I had a good enough time I can't remember.  That's what police reports, medical transcripts, academic boards, and affidavits are for.

 

But let me see if I can cough up some of the high points.  I'm going to go ahead and assume that the last time you saw me was in high school, so, let's start with that glorious period right after Cheap Trick went on a twenty-year hiatus from making good albums called....

 

The Eighties

 

After high school, I spent the summer not doing much of anything except working at a variety of odd jobs and driving aimlessly around the state with my friend Mike.  We bought about a zillion LPs in a wide variety of styles and listened to those constantly.

 

That fall, Mike and I joined the US Air Force.  I became a policeman, and had orders cut for Camp New Amsterdam in the Netherlands.  About a week before I was to leave, an entire flight of cops got busted for drugs at another base, and I was instead shipped off to Spokane, Washington.

 

The USAF and I reached a mutual understanding, eventually, and I got out and went back to college.  Unfortunately, nobody told me that the presumed point of going to college was to get a degree and eventually leave.  I was operating under the assumption that the idea was to get an education.  So I stayed, off and on, for about ten years, declaring at least that many majors at different times and finally getting a degree by going into the registrar's office, dropping my thick transcript on the table, and saying, "I've got this and six hundred dollars.  What can you give me?"

 

In the early eighties I mostly worked at restaurants, generally in the pizza-delivery end of things.  In the latter half of the eighties I was employed at Boeing, although I don't think they ever got any actual "work" out of me as such.  I mostly sat at a desk in a noisy machine shop and wrote loads and loads of pointless drivel, a tradition that continues up to this very moment.

 

I got married once in the 1980s, but it didn't take.  Here's a hint: when your buddies are starting a pool on when the divorce will happen, and people are already referring to your spouse as "his first wife," and you're still at the wedding reception, well, just don't plan the Golden Anniversary party.

 

The Nineties

 

One October day, sitting at my desk at Boeing, I worked out that if I cashed in my 401(k), and added in my last two checks and my Christmas bonus, I would have almost eight thousand dollars.  The way things were going in my life up to that point, I figured that was more than enough to last me the rest of my life, so I quit the job that was paying me an incredible wage and giving me free medical and dental and vacation time and sick time and paid holidays to do nothing but sit there and write all evening.  I am incredibly smart; just not terribly clever.

 

Upon running out of money around February the next year, and, to my shock, remaining free of Death's icy grip, I called up a friend in the software industry and got a job writing smartass remarks for a game which was never made.  I got Mike a job there too, and we spent our days playing computer games, eating large lunches, buying absolute truckloads of albums (now in the CD format) and occasionally turning in a few pages of silliness.  Somehow, this skill set turned me into a Project Manager for a CD-ROM based on the Old Testament, but the company went under before we could do anything with it.

 

I had gotten remarried in the interim, to a lovely woman who, it turns out, couldn't really live in the same house with me.  I concluded that, if we were doing okay sleeping in separate rooms, then things would be really great if I left the state completely, and so I moved to Portland.

 

A week after moving to Portland and getting settled in, I realized that I had, once again, forgotten to get myself any sort of a job or way of creating income.  Down to my last package of Top Ramen and three cigarettes, I went downstairs to the bar in the basement of my apartment building to use their payphone. 

 

As I walked in, a young man shoved past me, stopping to rip off his apron and hurl it at the owner, standing just inside the door.

 

"You can get another bartender, then!" the young man screamed, and stormed off.

 

I stepped inside, and the owner and I shared a brief, uncomfortable silence.

 

"Well?" he demanded.  "What the hell do you want?"

 

"I'm here about the bartending job," I replied.

 

After a few months, Mike moved down to Portland as well, and we spent lots of time playing video games and listening to loads and loads of CDs.  We also, one Friday night, drank a pitcher of Rusty Nails, and Mike still claims to have the hangover.

 

A couple of years went by, and Mike and I, one night, realized: Hey.  We don't really like living in Portland all that much.  That was followed closely by another thought: Hey.  We can move back to Seattle.

 

That was followed very closely indeed by my being headhunted to be a manager at a courier service in Seattle, which job I took with alacrity, eventually rising to become General Manager.  I got Mike a job there, too, and we got an apartment.  There were video games and CDs.

 

It was during this time that I started performing professionally as a singer in a bar band.  We did mostly blues and old rock numbers, and once we played a place where, no lie, a guy rode his horse into the actual bar.

 

At some point, I moved out to Bainbridge Island, and, at a later point, Mike moved out there, too.

 

I Have No Idea What To Call This Decade

 

At the beginning of this decade, I did something that I had always wanted to do, and took a three-week holiday to Japan.  This was, I have to say, one of the most awesome experiences of my life so far, especially the bits of it that took place in the city of Kyoto.

 

On New Year's Eve, 2000/2001, I went to a pub called the Pig and Whistle for a party.  I didn't know anyone there, but I was soon introduced to a guy named Crazy Dave (actually, I later named him that), a local English teacher.  We were enjoying ourselves immensely, and I turned to Dave and said, "Dude, this place is awesome."

 

Dave responded: "Hell yeah.  You should move here," and the lights went on in my head.

 

It took a couple of years, but I quit the job, took a brief sojourn to work at a hostel in Crested Butte, Colorado, and eventually moved to Kyoto.  I got a job teaching English, moved into a nice house with a beautiful young Japanese woman who is still making me crazy (not in the good, Mad-About-You way, mind you; more in the sort of way where when I start thinking about her, my friends say, "Oh Christ, here he goes again.  Come on, John, let's go get a drink."), and I started performing again, in a big way.

 

I did a theater production of Medea, which was entertaining for me at least, if not the audience, but mostly I started singing again.  Jazz, Standards, and Blues,  I was, at one point, making almost as much money singing as I was teaching.

 

Then, the company I was working for, which held my visa, went bankrupt.  That was pretty crushing.

 

So I moved back to the States, in with Mike.  We have a video game system or two around the house, and well over two thousand CDs converted to mp3 and loaded on the hard drive.

 

Now

 

I drive a truck, a long-haul flatbed for a medium-sized outfit based in Spokane.  It's very hard work.  I'm on the road for five or six weeks at a time.  I have wireless internet and an iPhone, so I can keep doing this writing, and I'm saving up the money.

 

Why?

 

'Cause I'm gonna move back to Kyoto and open my own nightclub.

 

Yeah.

 

Oh, and I had to have surgery Christmas 2006 to have a couple of tumors removed from my sinus and the underside of my brain.  So I finally quit smoking.  Yay me.

 

Even More Now

The truck driving thing is still going, although I am no longer driving over-the-road.  This means I get home every night and have been able to eat healthy food and exercise a lot, so now I'm losing the weight I gained when I quit smoking.

 

I went back to Japan for a bit in March 2010, just a brief holiday.  The girl over there is still making me crazy, but there are a couple of guitarists over there with whom I want to work some more, so I'll be heading back there again.  The next Big Trip, however, will be either to Australia or Argentina this next Christmas, since I've finally sussed out that the smart thing to do when it's cold in Seattle is to go someplace warm.

 

I'm still writing, in my copious free time, and working on various DIY projects and continuing my education.

 

If you really want to know more, and God alone knows why you should, you can always read my blog.  Click on the archive tab and pick a year.  I'm in the process of moving all the stuff from before 2004 over there, so that era is a little spotty.

 

And, if you already have my email address, feel free to write and ask me anything.  I'll either give you a straight answer, or a smartass one.  Occasionally they are even one and the same.