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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