Appetizer: What was your first “real†job?
When my family moved down to Massachusetts in 1988 it was at the very beginning of the summer holiday. I had no friends, nothing to do around the house and a father who grew up hard and had worked since he was old enough to walk. It wasn’t long before I was gently “encouraged” to find myself a job. I started working at the Concord Stop N’ Shop and actually kind of enjoyed it. I met Doug DeRome, who was older than me but would go on to be a friend through high school and beyond, and he taught me everything I needed to know about taggin’, stackin’ and stockin’. The manager called me into his office one day and told me he had checked with the head office and since I didn’t have a proper green card they had to let me go. “When you get permission to work in the States I’ll hire you back in a second.” It was all babysitting, snow shoveling, grass cutting and landscaping after that until I got my proper papers courtesy of Digital 2 years later. Needless to say, I did not go back to being a grocery clerk but instead started working in the service industry which would help put me through University and become a big part of my life for the next decade.
Soup: Where would you go if you wanted to spark your creativity?
Short of an opium den, I find blog memes like this very Friday’s Feast content-inspiring. A little prod can really open the floodgates and get you writing. I’d much rather have a proper muse, though. Albert Brooks had Sharon Stone running around naked in his guest house. Dudley Moore had Bo Derek. Damon Albarn had Justine Frischmann. John Lennon had Yoko O… scratch that last one. So basically, a hot and most certainly scantily clad woman running around the house repeating “You’re not getting any of this fat ass until you finish one more song/chapter/painting.”
Salad: Complete this sentence: I am embarrassed when…
People whom I respect want to discuss their opinions with me which, unbeknownst to them, I vehemently disagree with. My embarrassment doesn’t stem from feeling sorry for them – it’s nowhere near that simple or shallow. Rather, I feel uneasy because I have to ask myself: Am I getting something wrong? Do they know something I don’t? Am I ignorant, foolish or poorly read on this topic? If they’ve touched on an issue I feel strongly about, and I am confident in my knowledge of and ability to argue for it, I become uneasy because I’m then torn between keeping my mouth shut and avoiding a silly debate I’ve had a million times before with a million people before or nodding my head in faux-agreement like a eunuch and saying something like: “You’re right. Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11“. I am embarrassed for having the audacity to think I know more about something than somebody else – when neither of us, short of reading a newspaper, have any divine source of intelligence on the matter. All you can do is keep reading those newspapers and put yourself in check when you’re simply repeating someone else’s dead horse rhetoric over flat beer. Stay current, and above all else discern unique, personal insight from the party line. If more people questioned their perception of reality on a daily basis, allowed themselves to feel a degree of embarrassment and always considered both sides of the coin instead of settling into a comfortable viewpoint that will never change – we’d all be a lot closer to a tolerable, excuse me, tolerant planet.
Main Course: What values did your parents instill in you?
For reasons I’ll probably never fully understand, my father had an incredible hatred of thieves. He went out of his way to hammer this into me (literally), and to this day I can honestly say I’ve never stolen anything – save for maybe a pack of gum when I was 13 and trying to be cool. But even that is a fuzzy memory that I’m unsure really happened. My father spent a good part of his youth pulling my Grandfather out of gambling dens and bars until he eventually died when Gordo was only 13. Pop then dropped out of school to help take care of his Mother and 3 siblings. Now that I see my extended Canadian family frequently I am learning more and more about the father I am quickly losing. I’ve long since forgiven him for any and all of his parental missteps over the years, should he care. He did a great job in spite of severe emotional disadvantages I can only imagine.
Dessert: Name 3 fads from your teenage years.
Here’s a fun one. This is hard to pinpoint or rank, so I’ll perform a brain-dump and hope it comes out kinda legible. Manchester music, definitely. So much of my Junior and Senior years revolved around a culture, city, record label and nightclub that was 3,000 miles away. Odd in retrospect, but then so is the fact that I still listen to and love all of those bands to this day. Tecmo Bowl was insanely popular and I spent many hours sending Bo Jackson up the middle of the gridiron with his four available running and passing plays when I was supposed to be studying. Mike Tyson’s Punch Out ran a close second. Concert t-shirts – I couldn’t get enough of them. Sometimes I think I went to concerts just so I could get a t-shirt and then wear it around school the next day. “Yeah, that’s right. I was at the Divinyls show last night. Jealous?”
