But that's where our stories diverged. Sellers went off to a huge secular university in pursuit of an MBA, eventually becoming disillusioned and embarking on a quest to reinvent himself as a writer and indie music aficionado.
I, on the other hand, attended a small Christian college with no particular aim in mind, eventually ending up with a BA in philosophy. Tired of being dirt poor, I decided to shift gears and teach myself something about computers so that I could get a decent job.
Now, some 21 years after that Huey Lewis concert, our stories have oddly dovetailed. Sellers is a professional writer, having written for publications like GQ and Entertainment Weekly, and of course he's published a book. I spend my days building software applications, but writing is still my passion. I've self published a collection of my humor pieces, and I'm nearing completion of my first novel.
In junior high, Sellers and I used to trade bizarre stories about Dr. Weird (my alter ego) and Dr. Strange (Sellers' alter ego -- no relation to the Marvel comics character). Sellers would write a Dr. Strange story in which Dr. Weird played some part, and then I would write a Dr. Weird story, using that incident as a jumping off point. Dr. Strange would then show up at some point in my story, and Sellers would incorporate that into his next installment. In this way, we developed a sort of semi-unified narrative, our characters inhabiting the same universe, like Daredevil and Spider-Man. Of course, in my stories, Dr. Weird was always the hero, and in Sellers' stories, it was Dr. Strange.
So when Seller's responded to my rebuttal to some of his recollections in Perfect from Now On, I had an odd sense of deja vu (Side note: how is it that Firefox recognizes deja as a word but not vu?). Here we were again, Dr. Weird and Dr. Strange, inhabiting the same universe, but somehow each the hero in our own stories.In any case, I thought it was only fair that I post Sellers' response so that you can all hear his side of the story. It might not make much sense if you haven't read my original post, however. And if you really want the full story, buy Sellers' book, Perfect from Now On.
Anyway, enough with the intro already. Here's Sellers' response.
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First of all, Diesel -- if I may call you that -- thank you for the shout-out and the well-argued post about my book.
And thanks for refreshing my memory about this:
"Sellers was so convincing in his indignity at the people who had illegitimately snuck into the sixth row ("We're supposed to be here!") that the security guard didn't even bother to check our tickets."
Indignant misdirection, of course, was a ruse commonly employed by Ollie North himself, that "American hero."
(Did I ever really call him that? Holy, holy crap. I can tell you with perfect honesty that I never gave a rat's heinie about him, at least not until he appeared on a few episodes of JAG, which I liked for some damn reason.)
A lot of your points about my personality back then are completely valid. My insecurities -- and I had (still have) a lot of them -- were a product of 1) growing up in a hugely dysfunctional family, 2) attending a private school where everyone's parents seemed to have more money than mine (or at least owned their own homes) and weren't divorced and 3) extreme adolescent confusion brought on largely by genetic betrayal. I tried to hide these insecurities and probably did an okay job of it but most of the time I just wanted to hide. Which I did partly by moving from crowd to crowd.
I love the term crossover dork, and it so perfectly describes me that I may as well go back and change the title of Perfect From Now On to Crossover Dork From Now On.Still, I don't think it's fair to extrapolate some of my 8th and 12th grade flaws to what I'm like today. I'm a bit of a late bloomer.
Musically, though, I have always without a doubt listened to music purely for the joy of it. My musical tastes have simply shifted over the years.
I used to LOVE Huey Lewis. You know that. I still think he's a cool dude; I even saw Duets. Wasn't the biggest fan of Fore, and I think that's where he lost me, but Picture This and Sports are still played in my p.o.s. Chevy Corsica, which ridiculously has a cassette deck. But I also listen to a lot of other stuff that I genuinely like, and which I genuinely rock out to with the same abandon that you do on I-580. A lot of this happens to be indie rock (and I might point out that the more popular formerly or currently indie artists, like REM and Radiohead and the Shins, could be described as the musical equivalents of "crossover dorks"). That geeky formula came about mostly because, well, I'm a geek, but also out of a desire to make less geeky people laugh about said geekery.
Two other points:
1) Did we ever kill goblins in your basement? I recall a lot of bugbears and orcs and frost giants -- but no goblins. I do of course remember the Towne Club pop and JT's pizza, as well as the time that Kyle (who was more "terminally hyper" than a rebel, in my opinion, although I'll grant you Van Wynen and yeah, yourself) "died" a mere five minutes into a module out of rabid disinterest in D&D.
2) I interviewed E. Gary Gygax [the creator of Dungeons & Dragons -- Diesel] before he died, and it was one of the more significant moments of my life. Maybe I should interview Huey Lewis, just for you (and the person I was at age 15).
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Sellers informs me that he still has some of the stories we wrote together; I'm trying to get him to photocopy them and send them my way. I'm not sure how entertaining they will be at this point, but I think they would give you an idea of how demented we were as children.
The pictures, by the way, are from our 1984-85 yearbook. Glacial Spain and I did the 'caricatures,' such as they are.
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Labels: Anecdotes, Shout-Outs
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