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Trying To Find A Radio

Every now and then, I remember that I co-wrote a successful column for my university newspaper for two years, and think to myself, “how did that happen?”

The answer, realistically, came from the fact that they had open submissions and were desperate for new material, but more than two decades later, it still seems unlike me to have submitted anything in the first place, and I genuinely can’t remember how I managed to convince Andy, my best friend at the time, to do it, either. Maybe we should just chalk it up to the confidence of youth.

I was underselling it before; it wasn’t just a column — we had that, sure (“Gubbins,” it was called, which was either Andy’s suggestion or the editor’s), but we also had a comic strip wholeheartedly ripped off of the Kyle Baker and Evan Dorkin collaboration from the early 90s where they reviewed shows together, a series of fake horoscopes, and a regular How-To guide to dancing like your favorite Britpop icons. We were astonishingly productive on a biweekly basis for two 20-year-old art students.

And, perhaps most surprising of all, it was a success, to the point of people recognizing us when we were out, which was an entirely surreal experience, and the byproduct of putting our likenesses in the comic strip in the first place. (Suffice to say, it was a small enough city we were all in for this to happen.) It was an odd brush with almost-fame that flattered our egos enough to be enjoyable, but was small enough to keep from being unpleasant.

We did all of this for two years, our second and third years in art school. By the end of the second year, we were pretty burned out and devoid of material, as well as all too aware that we should probably buckle down and be serious about course work in our final year, so stopping seemed like a good idea. I’m pretty sure our shtick was getting old by that point for other people, too.

I wonder, sometimes, how this all set me up for what I do for a living now; it was the first time I wrote about pop culture publicly, and in what I considered my own voice at the time. It was the first time I dealt with deadlines and audience response and… well, everything that my job is now, it feels like. Perhaps it was my secret origin.

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The Ongoing War Between Man And His Own Body

There’s a particularly cruel comedy in the fact that, yesterday, I celebrated the fact that I wasn’t suffering debilitating coughing fits for the first time in a week  by throwing my back out. I wish this was a joke, but sadly, I’m entirely serious; 2020 turns out to be a year of exciting new ways in which my body betrays me, it seems.

I noticed the back pain getting out the shower, but didn’t really think anything of it, which was likely a mistake; I figured I’d probably just bent over strangely washing my legs or something, but that it was a twinge that would soon right itself. This was, at best, extremely optimistic, given that a few hours later, I’d be struggling to rise out of a chair and found it difficult to walk between rooms. (The pain came and went all yesterday, but at its worst, I moved like an 80-year-old man whose back was broken decades earlier in an unfortunate jalopy accident.)

I remember being told that I was at the age where my body would just give up on me and fall apart, and I remember being somewhat cynical of the very idea; sure, I thought to myself, I might not be the healthiest man in the world but I’ve never had that many problems with my body. Oh, friends; if I knew then what I know now.

Honestly, my ultimate feeling about the whole thing isn’t sadness or self-pity or anything like that, as easy as it may be to give into such things. Instead, it’s a sharp and fully-formed frustration that I couldn’t just have, like, two days of my body working before things started going wrong again. Is my body so determined to pack in as much dysfunction and disrepair that my maladies have to overlap like this, for real? My schedule for sickness is so busy that we’re having to double-book?

I’m writing this early in the morning, lying in bed. I haven’t tried to get up yet, so right now all I really know is that there’s at the very least a dull ache back there waiting to be discovered when I push myself up. I’m not worried, though; at this point, I’m pretty confident that, should my back have cleared up overnight, my foot’s probably gone gangrenous to make up for it.

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Tell Me About It

For the past month, I’ve been curiously nostalgic for This is Hardcore, the 1998 album by Pulp. I’ve had various songs from it on rotation in my head all through February, with seemingly no rhyme or reason: the title track, “I’m A Man,” “The Fear,” whatever. There’s seemingly no rhyme or reason for it — they just show up in my head and play for awhile until they’re done, and then disappear as effortlessly and nonsensically as they arrived.

The thing that makes it so strange is that I’m not a really big fan of the album, per se; I don’t even own a copy. (I did buy a bunch of the singles that came from it, though, leading to “my” versions of some songs being the off-model, off-album versions; there was a longer version of “The Fear” in particular that feels right in a way that the album version doesn’t.)

I wasn’t a Pulp fan, not really. Part of that was because they felt omnipresent during the Britpop heyday, a band — and in Jarvis Cocker, a frontman — that was always there, always playing or being talked about, feeling exhausting as a result. This was down to my friends as much as it was pop culture, I know; I was hanging out with a crowd who loved the band far before “Common People” broke through, and even farther before I’d heard the word hipster, and Cocker was pretty much synonymous with cool, not that any of us would have used that word without irony at the time.

This is Hardcore, as it turns out, is an album about all of that; an album of exhaustion and hangovers and realizing that the dreams and aspirations of Britpop as a whole (and Cocker in particular) were hollow and unsatisfying, and wondering what else there was. It’s a melancholy album, one of the reasons I didn’t really like it when it was released, when I was young and still filled with some of those aspirations myself.

In that respect, it’s maybe an old man’s album, which might explain why it’s returned to my mental playlist: I’ve aged into it, and grown into the regret of younger choices that permeates the whole thing. Or perhaps I’ve just realized that “I’m A Man” still sounds great, more than two decades later.

 

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You Know I’m So Gone

I’ve been sick for the past couple of days. Not just slightly under the weather, but full-on, fever spiking and unable to stand up without wobbling, unable to eat, unable to shit, sick. It’s the second time this has happened to me this year, which is at once a sobering reminder of my own mortality and the sad fact that I’m not as young as I used to be, and also a sign of the fact that there’s definitely something weird going around these days. (No, it’s not coronavirus.)

For all that went wrong this time around — including being unable to eat without making myself extremely nauseous, even though my hunger didn’t dissipate in the slightest, which was a joy — the worst part was, again, the realization that fevers and I are the dumbest possible pairing. When I was fevered and delirious last month, I ended up convinced I had to write some quasi time-traveling pirate story for some reason; this time around, my brain got caught up in the fact that I’ve been binging episodes of the British Love Island from last year and basically wrote some fan fic about the series.

Look. I didn’t do it intentionally, okay…?

There remains something terrifying to me about that state, though — the part where you’re very aware that your brain isn’t working right, but you can’t do anything to stop it or make it work right. As happens, there was a story that I absolutely had to write for THR on the first of the two sick days, and I was both frustrated and horrified just how difficult that ended up being; I knew, objectively, what the story was and what I’d need to do to get it done, and I’d even already written it in my head, but when it came to actually typing it out and filing it, it seemed impossible, far beyond my reach. Words simply wouldn’t come, sentences couldn’t form. I felt an alien to myself.

I write this now at the very beginning of day 3, and I feel… almost better…? The difference between how I feel now and the past couple days is extraordinary, in terms of mental clarity and my body behaving again. I don’t want to say that I’m 100% just yet, but even just knowing that I could actually string those words together makes all the difference in the world.

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The Story Behind The Story

When a news story breaks and you’re reporting on it, it takes over your life. Last Friday’s story about Dan DiDio leaving DC is a perfect case in point; it’s something that went from is this happening? to this is happening at breathtaking speed, faster than most — easily in single digits in terms of minutes — and from that point on, I was just in the thick of it with emails, phone calls and Twitter DMs.

(Twitter has proven to be one of the primary ways information on stories like this is shared, oddly enough — I learned more through Twitter than I did any other form of media, yesterday, and I’m not entirely sure how that happened. It wasn’t even this way a couple of years ago, but I digress.)

Partially, of course, all of this is driven by the impulse of I want to be the one to break the story, and the competitive urge there. I think THR was either first or second (behind ComicBook.com) to get the news out there, and certainly the first (or second) to be able to confirm it instead of speculating. That’s a nice feeling and something fun to boast about, but it also brings a bunch of people asking two things over and over again: “What actually happened?” and “How did you find out?”

Beyond the competitive journalistic impulse, there’s something deeper and more intense: the need to just find out the truth of the whole thing. Again using the DiDio story as an example, I knew he was out long before I knew why, with two very different versions of events having been shared with me by people in the know as the real reason. Obviously, it was unlikely that both could be true, and I just really, really wanted to know what was actually the case.

So, I kept digging and digging and updating the story and learning new things and talking to people about it, and suddenly it was two hours later and Chloe correctly pointed out that I hadn’t stood up or really even moved much for all that time, and that perhaps I needed a break. She was right; I went outside and it felt wonderful, but curiously alien and unusual at the same time.

Breaking news is, perhaps, why we’re in the game we’re in, but sometimes it makes us forget everything else out there.