Rocking the Suburbs

When I was in my twenties I had a very concrete sense of what the rest of my life would be like. I had lucked into a dream job as the head writer of The A.V Club, the entertainment section of The Onion, my favorite newspaper in the world while still in college and poignantly thought of it as a lifelong job. 

I wanted to be like my idol Roger Ebert, who wrote movies and was a household name thanks to Siskel & Ebert and appeared on The Tonight Show constantly but kept on reviewing movies for the Chicago Sun-Times pretty much up until his final day, despite famously having mixed to extremely negative feelings about Conrad Black, its super-villain of an owner.

When The Onion moved from its original home of Madison, Wisconsin to my home town of Chicago, I was overjoyed! At twenty-nine, my path was set before me. I would live in Chicago, where I experienced a uniquely terrible childhood and much of my family lived and spend the next five decades or so living in Chicago and writing movie reviews for The A.V Club. 

At the very end of my half-century stint as the backbone of The A.V Club, the owners would present me with a gold watch in appreciation for my decades of faithful service. 

Needless to say, things did not turn out that way. Things took a turn at The A.V Club and when I had an opportunity to jump ship and work with people I considered my closest friends and colleagues at The Dissolve I took it. 

Then things similarly took a turn and I found myself rudderless and lost after I was laid off from The Dissolve about a month and a half before its demise. 

Up until that point, Chicago wasn’t just my hometown and the city that I lived in: it was at the core of my identity. I was even more obnoxiously proud of being a Chicagoan and the toughness it engenders than most longtime residents of the Windy City. 

Then there came a point where I couldn’t afford to live in Chicago anymore in more ways than one. So a lifelong Midwesterner who thought he’d be a newspaperman until his dying days moved with his family into a basement in his in-laws’ home in wealthy Marietta, Georgia. 

Incidentally, when my older sister and myself visited Marietta for the first time because our younger sister lived there, the trip where I met the woman who is now my wife and the mother of my children, we agreed that Marietta was such a cold, strange, alienating place that we could never see ourselves living there, or anywhere like it. 

A few decades later I found myself a Marietta resident, albeit one who was extremely relieved when he got to leave the basement lifestyle and move to funky Decatur. I fucking loved Decatur. It’s wonderful,  a hip, diverse hipster paradise full of great places to eat and drink. 

We couldn’t quite afford to continue to live in Decatur, however, so we moved to a modest condo in Chamblee, Tucker, which I eventually grew to like, if not quite love, as well. 

Then, in a real switcheroo, the housing market became so red-hot that we couldn’t afford not to sell our condo and move elsewhere. 

So about two weeks ago we packed up all of our belongings and moved to a house in suburban Alpharetta, Georgia big enough for two wild children, a terminally ill dog, my wife, myself and my various mom and pop businesses. 

When I say suburban I mean SUBURBAN. I’m talking big, manicured lawns, garages with every house, cul-de-sacs and neighbors who introduce themselves and bring housewarming gifts. 

I’m not going to lie: ITS FUCKING WEIRD! I feel like I’m in a movie. I wonder sometimes how a city boy from Chicago who only ever wanted to write ended up a small businessman in suburban Georgia. 

I foolishly imagined, at a young age, that my life would follow a straight line and that a company and organization that I loved and believed in would take care of me. It turns out life is an endless series of zig-zags, false starts, detours and dead-ends but if you’re lucky, and I certainly have been extraordinarily lucky as well as unlucky, that crazy journey eventually takes you where you need to be. 

That’s me in Alpharetta right now. I’m finishing The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Joy of Trash, preparing to promote and distribute them, doing Travolta/Cage and taking care of my family. 

That’s not where I thought I would be at this age and this stage of my life but I’m proud of all that I’ve accomplished in the midst of depression, anxiety and the death of my industry. I’m equally proud just to have survived it.

You’ve got to survive in order to thrive and I’m hoping that all of the hard work I’ve been doing for literally decades will pay off in the very near future. 

Missed out on the Kickstarter campaign for The Weird A-Coloring to Al/The Weird A-Coloring to Al-Colored In Edition? You’re in luck, because you can still pre-order the books, and get all manner of nifty exclusives, by pledging over at https://the-weird-a-coloring-to-al-coloring-colored-in-books.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are EIGHT so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

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