Under the influence
A Free Man and Boy Party Day has been changed to Tuesdays so we can go to music classes. Fortunately, my favorite Gator fan has stepped into the breach with his second (of hopefully many) guest posts. Before I turn it over to Jamie, I just want to say that his post was unsolicited - lest you think that everything is all about me:
Chris had asked me if I wanted to guest blog a bit for A Free Man, and while excited by the possibility, I initially demurred, because 1) I am lazy, 2) writing has become an exercise in terror and self-loathing since I am an academic (and more writing did not seem like a fun way to spend my time), 3) my best non-academic writing is rants which I recognize are tiresome to most people, and most importantly, 4) the pleasure of reading A Free Man seems to lay with Chris’ personality and persona in general. However, his post of yesterday inspired me to churn something out, since it would be about Chris himself and perhaps, therefore, not try the patience of this blog’s loyal readership. I read the post having just gotten back from a cocktail party, where a thirtysomething female colleague of mine regretted having spent her twenties in graduate school, instead of “partying and having lots of sex.” I knew how she felt.
Chris came down pretty hard on himself in his last blog post, for his life of dissolution while living in Seattle. And since he had to live through it, I cannot really blame him, but allow me to offer another perspective. Chris and I had been best friends since meeting in sixth grade, and our lives ran pretty parallel through high school and starting college. Then he got kicked out of college. Then he started a new college and quit that. None of this seemed too abnormal, lots of people leave school after all, but then Chris announced one day he was packing up and moving to Seattle, our generations’ not quite Haight-Ashbury. I was finishing school at the time, and had a big decision to make about my “future.” I was planning on starting a Ph.D. in history, which is a miserable seven year (at best) slog. Which meant I would have been going to school straight through K-12, four years of university, and seven upcoming years of graduate school – that is 24 years of schooling without a break. As Chris was sending me rapturous letters from Seattle (the optimistic early years there), I decided to put a break on my career path and drop out for a year. Note this was no titanic shift, just taking a year off before continuing my graduate work. I was going to move to 
Seattle too, get a job in a bookstore (ha-ha- no doubt impossible as that was every geek’s plan), and just enjoy life for a while without the stress of being perfect (I can count the number of Bs I have ever gotten on one hand, and I do not think this is a good thing). Basically I wanted the life of libertinage and irresponsibility Chris described in his post. I felt free for the first time since I has spent a summer in Mexico (studying of course). I was getting ready to tell Chris my plan (he would not have been thrilled, I suspect), when I got a letter stating I had won a major national fellowship for graduate study. I called to see if I could delay it for a year; they said I could if I had a good reason. My usual facility with bullshitting failed me, as I could not spin wanting to do nothing for a year into a good reason. I chickened out and accepted the grant.
I did pay a visit to Chris before graduate school started that summer, and my worst fears about my decision seemed confirmed. Chris lived in the hippest neighborhood in Seattle, he had what to me seemed like a cool “special lady friend,” and we spent a few days in various states of intoxication. Good times to a 22 year old. I left that to start a life of reading three to four books of 200 to 500 pages each week. Unless you are a speed reader, which I am not, this means you basically spend all your free time reading. Now I love to read, but as someone said about writing (Bob Dylan, perhaps?) which I think applies, “When you are writing, you are not living.” Chris seemed to be living, and while I constantly regretted not taking that year off, knowing that my friend was doing it somehow made things better, not worse. As years of graduate study stretched on, following Chris’ picaresque life inspired me to try to live better in what few ways a graduate student of history can (mainly regarding a certain woman I pursued in a manner uncharacteristic to my nature).
Chris has always been a great influence, whether it be introducing me to new writers, certainly to new music, but most especially to thinking about life in new ways. I’ve always loved his willingness to search for happiness instead of just wallowing in misery, his ability to remake himself, his courage to give up his current life and make a new one—and as this blog’s readers know, this latest move to Australia was certainly not the least momentous. In spite of my exploits over the years (swimming into Mayan ruins at night, huddled in a van while risking guerrilla roadblocks in Colombia) I have never been able to work without a net like Chris, and have excruciated over every possible choice in life, making sure every step was well-planned (at times leading to disaster nevertheless). I have often envied Chris his daring, but I would not now want to change radically my life of happy domesticity and tenured academia, and thus, cannot really regret missing out on Seattle. His travels and travails influenced me the way reading about a different life in a good novel can: you may not want to have lived that life yourself, but you feel as if you discovered something about living by having spent some time in its company.
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If you’ve not heard Warren Zevon then your life is not complete. He was a ray of light in a what was otherwise a pretty dark time in rock. He died too young, of mesothelioma, in 2003. Buy his Greatest Hits at 
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Thanks for bringing up the quality of writing here at A Free Man, Jamie. I do want to take issue with a few things:
1. I tried to have a lot of sex in the 90’s and generally failed.
2. I don’t think it’s my persona that keeps people coming here, so for your next post feel free to hit us with a proper Jamie rant. I always enjoy them and am sure that the gentle readers will as well.
3. You are my hero for using “libertinage” (which I’m not sure is actually a word) and “picaresque” in the same post. Way to throw down the gauntlet.
4. During that time, I envied your life. I couldn’t keep it together enough to stay in school - it wasn’t an active decision. I just couldn’t focus (might have been the drugs).
5. Working without a net - man, that too is not by design. I’ve been incredibly lucky to never really need that net. There are only little twists of fate that separate me from people that live on the streets talking to themselves, spend a lot of time in prison or end up dead.
6. Apparently I can still be a bit of a drama queen.
Thanks again for a great one Jamie and hope to see more from you, my friend.
18 Nov 2008 at 8:58 am
Great pair of posts. I too took the academic course and often have regrets that I missed out on life while locked in a cage (literally) in the library. I wouldn’t go back though. Thanks for the insight on parallel lives!
18 Nov 2008 at 11:47 am
I thoroughly enjoyed this post. It is amazing how different our lives look when viewed through the perspective of others. I love reading the dichotomy of the two. Together, they paint a much more complete picture.
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18 Nov 2008 at 12:03 pm
What a poignant tribute.
I’m new here, and still a bit in the dark, but I loved this post.
I can’t wait to read more . . .
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18 Nov 2008 at 1:29 pm
Alex - Where did you go to school? They had cages at the University of Florida library too! I always thought it was a particularly cruel symbolism. Luckily, the veal fattening pens seem to be absent from most new libraries.
18 Nov 2008 at 2:36 pm
They had them at Mizzou too. But science grad students were trapped in the lab rather than the library. I used to go to the library just to relax. I coveted a cage.
18 Nov 2008 at 3:02 pm
I think being drug-fucked and poor is overrated personally. But then I think I followed a similar path to you Jamie and never regretted it much at all. Sure you don’t get to be be hip and meet ‘famous’ people, but you get to make life-long friends whilst in an academic environment. I am not sure if Chris could count on two fingers the number of people he keeps in contact with from those days. Not that I am dissing Chris (which I guess I kind of am), just that self-centered, arty farty life-style which looks much greener from within the confines of academia.
Keep up the guest posts, it takes the pressure off me:)
18 Nov 2008 at 5:37 pm
I’m just going to say that I managed to woo Sinead with all my arty-fartiness.
18 Nov 2008 at 5:40 pm
great post. good to hear about chris from someone elses perspective.
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18 Nov 2008 at 6:37 pm
What a beautiful post. Sounds like you’re both lucky to have each other - I don’t have anybody from school who I still have such a strong friendship with. It’s pretty rare I reckon.
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18 Nov 2008 at 7:13 pm
Dudes, you guys are too funny. I can totally relate to Jamie. Why haven’t I had more sex? Too much damn studying that’s why. Why have I never seen such classic films as 12 angry men, casablanca, Psycho, Dr Strangelove? Why have I not read such important literary works such as Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, Grapes of Wrath, Ulysees? Why, til last year, was the only concert I’d been to RunRig? Why can I not recognise music by the Clash, the Cure, Lemon Jelly, The Doors? Why do i not know anything about any politics or philosophy? Despite being in education for the majority of my life I am an ignoramus. I know nothing. And what was the point of all that studying? Just coming to realise I’m not going to make it as an academic. Damn, I shoulda got the sex in early.
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18 Nov 2008 at 7:14 pm
Also how many drugs can you take for how many years before your brain fries?
18 Nov 2008 at 7:27 pm
Less that what I took. I think the more frequent lapses of memory that I have these days are directly due to my lifestyle from 1992 - 1996.
18 Nov 2008 at 7:51 pm
Personally, I think this was a spectacular post just as yesterday’s was, and I can see that you both have a good friend in one another.
Leading such different lives like that would have torn many friendships apart, with the distance not really having anything to do with it. More just the different directions. I think it’s amazing to look back at where we’ve been once we get mature enough not to wallow in our mistakes or spend an eternity reliving our glory days.
18 Nov 2008 at 7:54 pm
Jamie, Thanks for sharing “the other side” to Chris’s stories! This is going to sound cliched and lame, but old friends are great treasures.
Of course, so is a fifth of Makers.
18 Nov 2008 at 11:24 pm
“Less that what I took”. ahahah. exactly.
19 Nov 2008 at 12:00 am
…and then my head had nothing to say because this post along with the one from yesterday spoke directly to my heart. And my heart rarely has anything to say other than giving me the uncanny feeling that an unexpected and lovely breath of fresh air has shown up directly behind me and is encouraging me along this fantastic journey.
I love that uncanny feeling. Thanks guys!
19 Nov 2008 at 12:16 am
I love seeing both sides. Thanks for the guestage!
19 Nov 2008 at 2:04 am
I suppose the grass is always greener on the other side, no matter which side you’re currently on. It’s cool how two people can take wildly different paths and still end up in more or less the same place. I must echo your other commenters — you two are lucky to have each other.
19 Nov 2008 at 2:40 am
yes, lots of cool word usage in this post. I like ‘demurred’
19 Nov 2008 at 7:00 am
ssg; you have not done all those things because you are too young. You will probably get round to doing them, and have lots of sex too. Fear not.
Great twinset guys. And Warren Zevon was the pearls.
We are what we are and thank God for variety! And great writing.
19 Nov 2008 at 6:33 pm
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