Never even left the parking lot
When R.E.M. announced their first tour in six years in support of their latest album, Monster, in 1995, my sister and I knew that we absolutely had to go. My older sister, who had moved out for good in 1991, had taken me to my first-ever "real" concert two summers earlier, when we saw Aerosmith at the Arco Arena in Sacramento on the Get a Grip tour. (Although Aerosmith was my favorite band at that time, I was even more excited because Megadeth was supposed to be the co-headliner. Unfortunately, Megadeth had dropped off the tour after only a few dates after Dave Mustaine – shockingly! – butted heads with the other band, and were replaced as opener by embarrassing flash-in-the-pan Jackyl. You know; the chainsaw band.)
My dad and I secured tickets to the R.E.M. tour, for their stop at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, CA. It sounds insane to recount how the tickets were bought – through literally the only option available to us in a medium-sized city in California in 1995: we waited for the Warehouse music store to open on the day they went on sale, then went to the register and had them go to the TicketMaster terminal and sell us the tickets, which were then printed out on a dot-matrix printer. Simple!
My sister was working at a salon in Oakland at the time, and the plan was that my dad would drive me up to the salon as she got off work (I was still a year away from having a driver's license at the time), and she would drive the two of us to the concert in Mountain View while my dad returned home to Salinas.
We drove up to Oakland in my dad's dually diesel Dodge Ram, and got to see the salon where my sister was working and meet her boss. After a few minutes of visiting, my sister and I hopped in her VW bug and hit the highway, excited to see R.E.M. in real life.
After being on the highway for probably fifteen minutes (maybe twenty), a sickening feeling hit me: I'd forgotten the tickets in my dad's glove box, still tucked into their TicketMaster envelope that so resembled a tithing envelope, with its big back flap. Barely able to speak, feeling queasy, I uneasily told my sister that I'd forgotten the tickets in Dad's truck. So many horrible options hurtled through my mind: would we have to speed south on highway 101, hoping to catch up to his truck and wave him down? Was he too far in front of us and we'd have to drive all the way back to Salinas and then turn around and hope to catch the show after another 90-minute drive to Mountain View? Would it be too late to catch the concert at all?
I was beating myself up mentally as my sister calmly put on her blinker and took the next exit, then hopped back on the freeway in the opposite direction. I apologized again and again, feeling like history's biggest idiot. She seemed strangely at ease, and I was certain she was putting on a front to mask her immense disappointment. "Don't worry," she said, smiling. "I bet he never even left the parking lot."
I was confused, because that seemed like a long shot to me. But when we got back to the shopping center, we indeed found our dad, where he had parked in the first place, getting back into his truck after getting a soda, and about to head out. He was almost as surprised to see us as I was to see that my sister had been stunningly accurate about him. He never even left the parking lot. We grabbed the tickets, said our goodbyes (again), and got to Shoreline in time to suffer through an abysmal opening set by Sonic Youth before the sun even went down. We had a great time watching R.E.M. on the lawn.
But to tell you the truth, I don't remember any part of that concert half as well as I remember forgetting the tickets, and the mortifying (for me) trip back to the parking lot to find my dad dawdling before getting on his way. To this day, I remain shocked that my sister knew our dad that well at that time, especially since she hadn't lived with him in four years. To be honest, I don't know if I ever ended up knowing him that well, and I lived alone with him for over ten years.
I think about that a lot: about how well she understood him and his nature, and how him never leaving the parking lot is so totally of a piece with everything I now know and understand about him. And I think I finally understand his mindset at the time.
Never even left the parking lot. What; like I've got somewhere better to be? Give me a break.
Before I sign off this week, I just want to mention that I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to continue this newsletter. When I launched, I thought it could potentially be good for me for a number of reasons: getting back into the habit of writing; growing my profile as a writer again after seven years of my writing being entirely offline; earning some much-needed extra money; helping to build a safe community outside of awful social media; and writing about whatever happened to appeal to me.
I think the seven years of no longer being a full-time writer on the internet has pretty much torpedoed any hope of me being involved in cool things on the internet and all that time out of site has pretty much rendered me permanently out of mind for people who used to read me. I was always on the periphery of being part of the cool kids' club, if I was ever a member at all. I was always the last person thought of at any outlet I was at (if I was thought of, ever), and any time all my extremely cool coworkers and peers were doing a project, I wasn't asked to be a part. While all my peers were getting poached by ESPN, the Ringer, the Athletic, or a regional or national sports network, the only time I ever got poached was because the poachers recognized that I could serve as a babysitter and distraction to a horrid sex pest. I've watched all of the extremely cool and talented people I know write bestselling books and win awards and get YouTube channels and become fixtures of sports networks and become showrunners and staff writers, while I got ditched by my literary agent and all of my entreaties to create cool things are met with polite declinations. I know my place in the pecking order, so I'm not surprised that my newsletter base appears to have grown as large as it possibly can, short of me actually selling that screenplay (been writing them with no sale for over 20 years now!) or my novel getting published (getting close to 60 agent rejections on it!).
I'm aware this sounds like sour grapes with a side order of world's smallest violin, but I think it's probably time to be a pragmatist. It's very, very hard to raise a small child and hold a full-time job, and while I'm extremely grateful to my family members and a couple of others who I know read all of these newsletters, it's hard to be motivated to sit down to write these two to three times a week when I could be putting that energy toward another spec script that no one will buy or another novel that no one will read. Again, that sounds like a pity party, but if nobody's reading my newsletter and no one's reading or wanting to produce the other things I'm writing, I think I'd rather pour all my creative energy into those things, because they energize me a lot more at this point. (There's a thought toward posting an ongoing novel as I write it, but I guess I'd rather take my chances at getting paid for that someday instead of publishing it for free to an audience slightly larger than "me.")
This part of the newsletter has clearly gotten out of hand, but thank you all for reading, because I dearly appreciate anyone who even had a passing thought that they might want to read something of mine. It means an awful lot to me. Just wanted to give everyone fair warning that if the newsletter stops hitting your inbox, it's not you; it's me. (And to the incredible few of you who were willing to give me money, I'll make sure to shut off your recurring payments if I decide to pack it in.)
Thanks for your time. Sincerely.
