The story goes like this.

When I was 18, I hated English class. All through high school, Mrs. O’Conner did her best to stomp out any previous love of writing I may have had. When I was a senior, I took a creative writing class with someone else and discovered that I actually loved writing, but still hated my English class. This didn’t make sense.

At the time I was listening to a lot of classic rock, reggae, some occasional punk (or punkesque) like Pennywise, Blink (I don’t care what anyone says, everything through Dude Ranch was great), Less Than Jake, NOFX, Bad Religion, Social Distortion, Sublime (so much Sublime, in fact, one summer…pre-junior year, I believe, was dubbed, the “Sublime Summer”). Unfortunately, I also went though a big and ill-advised metal phase, involving the likes of Pantera, Sepultura, early Metallica (though when I sold a lot of my CD’s in college, I did hang onto “Ride the Lightning” and “Unjustice for All”), and many more that I’ll never admit to now.

My first college English teacher was unlike any teacher I had before. It wasn’t just the tattoos and piercings, and it was more than his combat boots and Green Bay Packers shirt that never matched his shorts. Eric let us write about whatever the hell we wanted to. He also helped us say and argue what we wanted rather than the way he thought the argument should be structured. It was a breath of fresh air. The most important thing I took from that class (both classes actually….I took 102 with him as well), both as a student and (now) as a teacher was one simple, but crucial message: English class doesn’t have to suck.

Later, Eric and I got to be pretty good friends (after I turned 21…). We talked a lot about English, grad school, and, of course, punk rock. I credit him with my introduction to Youth Brigade, which subsequently got me into Minor Threat and other early eighties gems. The “Someone Got Their Head Kicked In” comp remains one of my favorite records ever.

During this time, I also started regularly reading the fantastic punk zine, Razorcake, which Eric was involved with to some degree. As the years went by, I changed residences like 37 times and didn’t renew my subscription. I also lost contact with Eric.

When I moved into my new office, on campus, I found some old Razorcake issues tucked away in the back of my new desk. I took them home and decided to get a subscription. For some reason, I asked the mailorder guy if Eric still wrote for them. He emailed me the next day.

We had been emailing back and forth about punk, teaching, and shit. I guess he talked me up to Razorcake about writing reviews and stuff. To make an uninteresting story a bit more tactful, I’ve been offered a chance to write a column for Razorcake’s webzine. Topics are wide open and there is a strong possibility I’ll move up to the print zine eventually, most likely slogging through crappy bands for reviews and the like. No money, but that’s not really the point.

I’m gonna come up with a snappy pen name. Any ideas?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 12:30 pm and is filed under updates & me stuff, identity, music. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.