On the Chopping Block

15 Years--Longevity, 141,000 Miles—Incredibly Low, 1,000,000 Memories--Priceless

Cynthia and I have been having this conversation for several years. The conversation goes like this:

Cynthia (appealing to my practical side): Paul, you need to get a new car that has air bags and is safer than the little Sentra.

Paul: There is nothing wrong with my car. It is perfectly adequate for the limited traveling I do. It is paid for, gets great gas mileage, costs nothing to insure and license, only has 140,000 miles, and is not in need of any major repairs.

Cynthia: The paint job looks like crap, the visor fabric is shredding, and the fan only works on high.

Paul: Beauty is more than skin deep.

The conversation usually dies with neither of us feeling good about the outcome. Cynthia because she feels I am driving around in a death trap that will one day make her a widow. Me because I hate to acknowledge that while a new car makes sense I really have an affinity for this my first car.

So here is a literal travel log of what this car has been for me over the last 14 years (The odometer readings are based on my meticulous recording of each oil change this car has received):

August 23, 1993 (25 miles) – I brought in a cashier’s check drawn on my personal checking account for $11,560.53 for the purchase of a 2-Door 1993 Nissan Sentra XE Limited Edition. This purchase was made after years of saving most of my paper route earnings, my high school pizza job paychecks, and my graveyard shift Darigold paychecks.

I can remember that the dealership (Downtown L.A. Motors) could not for the life of them locate the second key for my car. They promised to mail it to me, but it never came. My dad finally reclaimed the Accord that was being driven back and forth to East L.A. for a week. Then I was on my way to BYU with my sister Winnie both for our Sophomore years . I changed how fast I was driving (at my dad’s suggestion) every so often so as not to do something to the engine.

November 27, 1993 (2,383 miles) – I returned home for Thanksgiving and changed the oil for the first time. Three months after the purchase and the extent of my driving was commuting back and forth to my summer job and a round trip to Provo and back. Not much driving at BYU.

In the meantime, I had met a young woman, Cynthia, who was attending my Statistics class. She was cute, funny, and didn’t mind that she always seemed to find me wearing turquoise sweatpants when she came to my apartment for Statistics study sessions! Cynthia was from my part of California so she hitched a ride home for the holidays.

April 20, 1994 (5,451 miles) – A second (Christmas) and third (home after school was out) round trip to Provo. Six months sure can change one’s life—Cynthia and I went out on our first date for her birthday (Jan. 14th) and we were pretty much inseparable from then on. I went home at the end of the semester while she stayed for spring term.

June 8, 1994 (8,058 miles) – A lot of commuting back and forth to East L.A. for the graveyard shift and to Chino to see Cynthia after sleeping the morning away. Gladly Cynthia was within driving distance because she learned I was not a phone conversationalist and letters (this was pre-email) just weren’t a viable long-term solution.

August 4, 1994 (10,856 miles) – Just more commuting and more Cynthia. I was accepted to BYU’s School of Accountancy.

October 28, 1994 (14,597 miles) – Back to BYU this time with my brother John along for the ride to start his freshman year. John, Cynthia, and I returned to California for Winnie’s mission farewell prior to her departure for Chile. On return to Provo, Cynthia and I discussed getting married while John and his friend Trevor were asleep in the backseat. We later were ‘officially’ engaged on Oct. 1st.

February 18, 1995 (18,790 miles) – I was hit on Nov. 12, 1994 by a hydroplaning little car. Body work was finished just after Thanksgiving. Home for Christmas and my wedding, return to Provo (now ‘home’) for another semester of school. We moved into our first apartment—a basement dive. We now have a 1984 Sentra and a 1993 Sentra as the vehicles of our family.

June 24, 1995 (23,062 miles written in Cynthia’s hand) – I was accepted to the Master’s program. We traveled to California for John’s mission farewell to Ecuador and for Patty and Trevor’s wedding. Carolyn was living in Provo.

January 1, 1996 (28,659 miles) – We celebrated our first anniversary at my parents’ home with everyone out of town. We went to “Beauty and the Beast”.

July 20, 1996 (32,994) – Cynthia graduated from BYU. I interviewed with Squire & Company and accepted their job offer. We moved into a MUCH nicer apartment.

December 12, 1996 (37,180 miles) – I am working part-time at Squire & Company until graduation. I graduated with my bachelor’s and master’s degrees of accountancy.

Well I could go on and on but these are really the milestones of this car. I love this car and I think it is because I fell in love with my sweetheart with it by my side.

September 16, 2008 (140,641 miles) – Twelve years later and I purchased our first and second homes, adopted three children, paid off our student loans, kept the same employer, bought two other Nissans, and have fallen only further in love with my wife. Now I have found another car—another grey Nissan.

This one is a Maxima and it has all the things my first grey Nissan doesn’t except the memories. Luckily those won’t go with the car because otherwise this car would be PRICELESS.

Perhaps I will keep the license plates. “Hey White Boy” as Cynthia says really is funny and is a part of this little car that I can pass on to this new car. I hope this Maxima brings me just as many wonderful memories over the next 14 years as this Sentra has.

P.S. I readily acknowledge that I have left out many important events in my and your lives, but for the sake of brevity (LOL) this is all you get.

This Nova Went!

Growing up my family had two vehicles—a custom Ford Econoline Van (1982ish) and a Chevy Nova (1976). The Nova was a hit in the US, but a bomb in Latin America. In English we know a ‘nova’ to be some sort of star. In Spanish ‘No va’ as it is pronounced means “no go”. Not a great selling point for an automobile that’s only reason for existence is to take you somewhere!

I didn’t grow up in Latin America, but instead in Southern California. Southern California has its share of Spanish speakers, as well as every other language spoken in this diverse world we live in. What is my point? I knew that Nova was Spanish for ‘no go’. But I knew differently—our Chevy Nova was no gutless four-cylinder rice-burning Japanese import. It was a beefy American car built like a tank with an engine intended to get it down the road.

My first memories of this blue two-door passenger car (the picture is the right blue, but the 4-door model) take me back to family vacations. Every summer we took at least a two-week vacation to drive from our home to American Fork, Utah to visit my maternal grandparents and visit Brigham Young University (my parents’, and later my, alma mater). This was a 12-hour drive in those days when the speed limit was 55 mph for fuel conservation. From there it was 8 hours further north to Emmett, Idaho (above Boise) to my paternal grandparents’ dairy farm.

The Nova was our only car until the van. So by 1982 and the purchase of the family van, my family consisted of me (age 10), Winnie (8), John (5), Ilene (3), and Mark (1). Yes, every year from 1976 to 1982 my family made this long trip with more kids to wrestle with.

The Nova had bench seating in the front and back. Good thing since we were carting around 7 passengers—five of them children! This was in the days before seat belt or car seat laws. I can remember taking naps in the area intended for your feet. I remember my little brother’s baby carrier sitting between my mom and dad in the front seat. Somewhere in the midst of this chaos was also a little cooler containing snacks and a jug of ice water.

These trips were made in the summer and this car did not have air conditioning. My parents, I acknowledge without reservation, deserve sainthood just for making these pilgrimages. Dealing with 3 to 5 children (depending on the year) in a confined space while driving through the desert with no A/C is a textbook definition of “cruel and unusual punishment”.

I have made this trip backwards from my home in Utah to visit my in-laws in Southern California many times with my three children. But my trips are very different. It is in a minivan with A/C and my laptop playing whatever animated film my children request to keep them from asking me the constant “how much longer?” and other childish inquiries.

So, like I said, my parents deserve ‘Parent of the Year’ for making these trips without leaving one of us by the side of the road in the middle of the Mojave Desert that makes up the I-15’s northeast pathway from Southern California to Utah.

In an age before water parks, my family often went swimming at a neighbor’s pool or on occasion made a trip to Puddingstone. This man-made beach/lake in San Dimas, California was a favorite. It had a sandy shore and extended to a “deep end” of some 13 or 14 feet. It had several water slides and diving boards. The high dive was the ultimate in childhood bravado and daring. Puddingstone was later purchased and made into Raging Waters. I have never been there, but I still have fond memories of jumping off of the high dive and trying to grab some sand at the bottom of the deep end to prove that I could go that far down.

It was on one of these trips that an interesting event occurred. Puddingstone’s admission fees was on a per-vehicle basis. So some time in the late 1970’s we piled into the Nova us four kids and a neighbor family and their kids. So here we were two mothers and seven kids in ages ranging from 8 to 1. We were nearly to our home’s off ramp heading south on the 57 Freeway. Suddenly our car was moved sideways. My mom was at the wheel and as you can imagine with seven kids in tow and the windows down for ventilation it was a noisy car! She didn’t know what had happened, but decided to pull over. The rest of the story has been filled in over the years by my mom. A semi-truck carrying a load of tomatoes hadn’t seen us and had changed lanes. Since he hadn’t seen us his front bumper clipped our back bumper causing us to be pushed out of our lane. The truck driver stopped as well and as my mom tells the story grew paler as each additional child exited the car and piled on to the side of the freeway. The car sustained only slight cosmetic damage (a flesh wound) which we never had repaired. The truck driver apologized profusely and with that we all piled back into the car and went on our merry way.

As I have alluded to in previous blogs, the Nova was often our mode of transportation on rainy days to deliver our newspapers. I can remember one particularly windy day when my sister, Winnie, got out of the car to deliver a newspaper to one of my route’s customers. Upon tossing the paper (it was a bad throw to begin with) a gust of wind carried it onto the roof of their house. What horror to a little boy. Luckily, we had a few extra papers and we simply left another on the porch. That paper was on the roof for months afterward and I nor they ever mentioned it.

Some time in 1984 or 1985 my dad and I went home teaching. For the uninitiated in the LDS faith, home teaching is a monthly home visit made by male members to all church members involving a spiritual thought and simply an opportunity to make sure all was well with the family. My dad and I were assigned to two older couples with no children at home. The family we were visiting that Sunday afternoon was my piano teacher and her husband. As is normal in metropolitan areas, I locked my door as I exited the car. The closing of the door sounded different this time. I paused to make sure the door had closed (it had) and turned towards the house.

After our visit, my dad unlocked the door for me. But to my surprise the door wouldn’t open. From then on that door never opened again. So our two-door Nova was now a one-door car. Of course, over the years this became a family joke. When I was old enough to drive my grandpa would say to me that the Nova was the “perfect date car”. Why? I would ask, “Because your date can’t get out.”

My dad always dropped me off at high school because it was on his way to work. Here was the morning routing: stop the car, open the driver’s-side door, dad exits the car, I crawl across the seat and exit the car, dad gets back, and travels on to work.

Of course, I grew and soon I was on the driver’s side of the Nova with my learner’s permit. Then I just had to get out of the car and dad would slide over on the bench seat. It is at this time, that the radio became an important feature of the Nova. The Nova had an AM-only radio with those push levers that memorized the radio station’s placement on the AM dial. Another strike against our Nova for a teenage driver—AM only radio, one functioning door, no A/C, and the leather-like upholstery was starting to show its age.

My mother came up with a solution to the cracking upholstery. Bath towels were purchase and sewn together to fit all the way across the bench seating both front and back. Not the classiest solution but one that was both functional and advantageous. No longer did you jump out of your seat upon sitting after the upholstery had been baked by the hot California sun.

My passage into teenage freedom (my driver’s license test) arrived in September 1987. We drove to the Pomona DMV for my driver’s test. The driving instructor walked to the passenger door and attempted to open the door. I quickly unrolled the window and explained that the passenger door was jammed shut. With a look of disgust the driving instructor informed me that there would be no driving test in a car that was clearly unsafe. I returned a few weeks later and passed my driving test in our Ford Econoline van. Fortunately I was not asked to parallel park that behemoth!

With the ability to drive myself around town and none of the authority of my parents, driving the paper routes with my siblings soon devolved into my siblings climbing out of the passenger door window “Dukes of Hazzard”-style. By now that door had been jammed shut for 5 years and at an age of 20 years it was no longer respected.

My friends and I all had access to the family sedan. The Nova was given the nickname “Blue Bullet” because it was the fastest of the family sedans. Somewhere around this time the gas gauge began to falter. This trusty car was showing its age. It had served faithfully for more than 20 years now. By this time, we had added a used manual-transmission Honda Accord to our family’s transportation arsenal (our first “rice burner” foreign car).

The gas gauge would vacillate wildly from empty to full, from ¾ full to below empty. It was slightly annoying and slightly amusing. Over time you learned that the vacillations tended to subside the more empty the fuel tank was. So to be on the safe side I think the Nova usually had at least a half tank of gas in it. Graduation 1989 was the day fate struck. My graduating class went to Disneyland for Grad Night. We arrived back in the school parking lot by bus at 6:30 am the next morning. Now, I had to drive my friends home. The gas gauge wasn’t vacillating, but I was exhausted and pushed my luck. The car sputtered to a stop at the intersection of Diamond Bar Blvd. and Maple Hill. My remaining friend and I managed to push it out of the busy intersection, walk to his house, and to call my dad for help.

The Nova had grown on me. I remember putting the pedal to the metal one night on the way home from my pizza restaurant job. I was neck and neck for a while with a fellow co-worker’s IROQ-Z. He was impressed and I knew that while this car was an oil-leaking beast it still had some muscle under the hood.

One night after closing at the pizza restaurant I entered the parking lot to find the back window intact but shattered in a million pieces. Apparently some BB gun-toting individual thought shooting windows would be a lot of fun. I drove home unable to see out the rear window. A bump caused a circle of glass to drop out of the window. I got home that night and applied masking tape to the edges of the hole to keep it intact. It was about a week later that we got the window replaced but not after losing more glass shards and expanding the taped edges.

I had visions of fixing the Nova up. But I went away to college and then on to serve a 2-year LDS church mission. During that two-year mission the Nova was sold to a neighbor for a couple of hundred dollars. He was a handyman and as I understand it he had the door unjammed in an afternoon! This was after several inquiries of Neil, our auto mechanic, to fix this problem. The Nova suffered an ignominious death. After years of faithful service the Nova was totaled in a crash involving this neighbor’s newly-licensed daughter.

This Nova was anything but “no va”. It was the Energizer bunny that kept going and going. Thanks for the memories Blue Bullet.

I Want My Two Dollars!

I promised a sequel to my “Speedy Delivery” blog…so here it is. After reading this blog you will understand why I am now a CPA accounting for others’ money rather than an entrepreneur running my own successful business!

The Progress Bulletin delivered to my house the number of newspapers that had been assigned to my route each day. Sometimes I would receive a cancellation notice because a subscriber had called the newspaper and decided they didn’t want the paper any more. Most of the time, I received new subscription notices telling me that someone had called the newspaper and decided to subscribe. So each day the papers were provided to me based on the number of subscribers on my geographical route.

At the end of the month, I received a bill from the Progress Bulletin for the number of newspapers received each day. My job was to “collect” the subscription every month and use some of that money to pay the Progress Bulletin for the newspapers. As I remember the subscription for a month of porch-delivered newspapers was $5 and I paid the Progress Bulletin somewhere around $2 a month for the actual newspapers. So for a month’s worth of work I made $3. Times that by an average of 30 subscribers and I could make $90 a month—serious cash in 1982 for an 11-year old. Now let’s not spend any time coming up with an “hourly wage” for this enterprise.

I was given a ledger book that I used to keep track of who had and hadn’t paid their subscription each month. At the beginning of each month, I had to make my monthly trip to each subscriber’s house to collect the subscription. I hated “collecting” not because I didn’t want the money, but because I had to drop by some of my subscribers' homes several times to finally find them at home and willing to pay me.

Why didn’t the Progress Bulletin allow subscribers to pay monthly to the newspaper and then just pay me? Too much paperwork and added employees, I suppose. Plus they wanted us to have the opportunity to receive tips for our great service.

Alas, it was my lot each month to try and collect me subscription money. Many of my subscribers were easy to find at home and more than willing to pay their $5—cash or check—with an extra $1 or $2 for my wonderful service. These subscribers were the ones I liked, always friendly and appreciative and willing to pay their bill. But of my 30 subscribers there were always at least 6 who were your worst nightmare! These were the subscribers who were never home or who never had the money/checkbook when you came around to collect the bill.

These select subscribers became the bane of my paper route. Over time these subscribers showed up in my ledger book as not having paid for several months despite repeated attempts to collect my hard-earned money.

The ones who never paid would eventually get caught with money in their wallet or the checkbook handy. In those rare instances, I would ask for payment for several months of delivery. It was a windfall! The newspaper gods were merciful on those days. I had collected a debt that I figured would go unpaid. Why didn’t I just quit delivering the paper to these deadbeats? I don’t know; they were the same houses that had several days’ newspaper on the porch at any given time. They didn’t value the newspaper and my delivery service and saw no reason to pay for it. I should have seen the folly and just “fired” my bad subscribers. I was a glutton for punishment holding out hope that they would pay me for what I did.

Then along came the 1985 movie Better Off Dead starring John Cusack to make “collecting” an even more terrible experience. I have never seen this movie, but have read the plot summary and know one line from the movie by heart—“I want my two dollars!” This timeless line from the movie became a favorite joke at several subscribers’ homes each month when I came “collecting”. Here is the typical scene:

Teenage son answers door, sees me, and shouts to parent “Mom/Dad the paperboy is here!” Teenager turns back to me and says “Have you seen that movie where the paperboy is always coming by the house and saying ‘I want my two dollars’?” This was always followed by teenager’s laughter. Keep in mind, I was 14 by now and was as old as many of these teenagers answering the door. The dialog was meant to be demeaning and I knew it. It was a veiled way of saying “You are the biggest loser I know.”

So now I had two types of subscribers to endure—the ones who would never pay and the ones who paid but had kids my age who made me feel like cow dung.

I never tried to expand my paper route’s penetration rate. I was content pocketing $90 a month for delivering papers to my 30 subscribers. Never once did it occur to me that I was riding my bike past 90 percent of the homes on my route each day because they were “non-subscribers”.

Looking back if I had spent just a little time trying to attract new subscribers I could have made more money for no more physical exertion. Then again how many of those new subscribers would turn out to be deadbeats or have teenage kids that made me feel like trash? It is a question that will go unanswered. I am not an entrepreneur looking to expand my fortune. I am a servant willing to fill the needs of others when solicited.

Even now as an accountant who bills clients hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees a year I hate making those “collection calls”. Those dreaded phone calls to discuss with a client why a bill has gone unpaid for months after the services were rendered. Luckily, I mostly have great clients who recognize the value of the services rendered by me and my firm and willingly pay for those services in a timely manner. But there are still those few clients who make me feel like I am 14 again. Please dear client, “I want my two dollars!”

Speedy Delivery

I alluded to this entry in my last blog. This is a long blog and I haven’t scratched the surface. So get comfortable and expect a sequel to this one.

My dear wife, Cynthia, loves to tease that I grew up in the “rich” area of our LDS stake back home in southern California (For you uninformed readers, Cynthia and I grew up in the same LDS stake—three years apart in high school, separate school districts, yada yada yada—but didn’t know each other). If you define “rich” by the standard of rolling hills then we were RICH. Cynthia grew up in Chino—the lowlands—where it was mainly dairy farms; while I grew up in Diamond Bar—the hills—where they grazed livestock. The name Diamond Bar comes from the name of the ranch that made up a large part of the city at one time. Sorry I digress.

Where was I? Oh. Hills. My home was situated on a hill. My backyard had a slope that fell approximately 400 feet down to the 57 Freeway shortly before it merges with the 60 Freeway to create one of the most masterfully designed traffic jams ever engineered by the geniuses of CalTrans.

I cannot recall how I became a newspaper deliverer, but at the ripe old age of 10 ½ I had a paper route. I believe I had approximately 25 subscribers for the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper The Progress Bulletin. The Progress Bulletin was the perfect newspaper for young paperboys because it was an afternoon paper during the week and a morning paper on weekends. So every day after school I folded my papers, loaded them onto the handlebar bags, and hopped on my bike.

This was 1982 and I had a maroon bicycle—the one-speed kind with BMX handlebars and a banana seat. I think it had a logo on the frame that said something like Firefox. It was past its prime in 1982, so I was the laughing stock with a banana seat. This was a bad 70’s flashback that I could never shake; as you will see.

Let me describe my paper route for you. I would coast down the hill from my house to the beginning of my delivery route. Then climb up a hill throwing papers to the houses that subscribed. I had a subscriber at the end of this street so I had to always go to the top of this hill. Next, turn around and go down the hill, cross a street, deliver some more papers on my downward course. Hang a left and climb up a small hill, delivering papers, hang a left, then another left, and go down the small hill on a street parallel to the one I went up. That finished my paper delivery and then all I had to do was climb up the hill back to my house. The round trip probably encompassed 1 ½ miles of road.

I had this paper route for 3 years. In those 3 years I was able to acquire two additional routes which were divided up to my younger sister and younger brother as they got old enough to deliver papers. These other routes were relatively flat so they got to coast down the hills, deliver their papers, and simply climb back up the hill once. Lucky dogs.

Never once did I wear a helmet or other protective gear. Don’t judge my parents for their apparent disregard for my safety nor for the possible child labor law violations associated with this work. We were responsible kids who by the grace of You Know Who (Not “He Who Must Not Be Named” all you Potter freaks!) were spared countless times from being hit by cars!!

After three years of this paper route my parents moved us across town. The primary reasons for our move were to get a bigger house and to get into the better school district. So we moved the summer after I finished Lorbeer Junior High School. By Divine intervention, The Progress Bulletin, followed us. Not long after moving a paper route became available and as a high school freshman with little social ties to a new neighborhood, I took it. I also played tenor saxophone for the high school band so right away you can label me a social outcast because of my second-class citizenship as a ‘band geek’.

Now this bigger house was in the MEGA-RICH part of town as defined previously by the amount and steepness of its hills. This paper route included a hill that quite literally was no less than a 45-degree slope along with the climbing up and down of the other streets for delivery. This hill was so steep that our Ford Econoline van would not make it up the hill at faster than 5 mph (Luckily the even steeper hill was never part of our routes). The kicker was a home with a 100-yard uphill driveway. See The Progress Bulletin was a porch-delivered newspaper. This was top-notch service. Many subscribers can attest they knew when the paper was delivered because the newspaper slammed into their screen door in an intrusive “Here’s your paper” greeting.

Providence continued to shine on me and my siblings. In short order, two additional paper routes came open in our neighborhood. So now we had three routes for three kids. Another sister eventually was added to the mix, but based on the amount of whining and complaining she constantly expressed this was definitely forced labor for her. As for me and my other brother and sister we were too stupid to know any better. Each of these routes had plenty of hills to climb. Streets named Kiowa Crest, Morning Canyon, Leaning Pine, and Cliffbranch just sounds steep don’t they?

By this time, I had moved up to my dad’s old ten-speed bike. My dad and I devised a way to place a particleboard slab on the bike rack and thus carry a duffle bag full of newspapers. Instead of having them in front of me on the handlebars, they were behind me on the bike rack. This kept me from getting the newspaper bags caught in the front spokes of the bike—a very dangerous and real problem when zooming down these steep hills. As a result of this “move up” my brother inherited the maroon bike. My sister had a blue bike also with banana seat. My brother got a scooter for Christmas one year. You remember when that craze came around the first time in about 1985. He opted to deliver his papers by scooter rather than have to ride the maroon monstrosity.

One thing you will learn about my family is that nothing gets thrown away. When my parents relocated to Chicago 5 years ago the moving van stopped here in Utah to drop off a piano, a coffin-style freezer, assorted other things, AND my maroon bike! Nearly 20 years after its original purchase this curse of a bike was again in my garage. It was quickly sent to Deseret Industries along with the tenor saxophone! Maybe someone appreciates it now that the 70’s styles have become retro chic. Somehow I doubt banana seats ever became cool again.

I later delivered my newspapers mainly by car once I had my driver’s license. This was much to the thrill of my siblings who also no longer were required to ride their banana-seated bicycles throughout the neighborhood.

What did I gain from all of this? Well I can recall a very uncomfortable discussion in Business Law class that will sum up the benefits of this paper route. Cynthia and I were dating and we had this class together along with two of my high school friends. It was the spring of 1994 and I was wearing knee-length shorts that day (in accordance with BYU dress-code policy—thank you very much Allison!). As we were sitting listening to the lecture out of nowhere my friend Scott turns to me and observes “Paul, you have very rugged legs.” Followed by a very long pause as I tried to fathom where such a remark had come from. “Thanks” was all I uttered and rather dumbly at that. It was several years later before Scott officially “outted” himself.

So what was the benefit of these paper routes? From the lips of a gay man—I have rugged legs.

The Darker Side of Paul

Well here goes…I began this whole blog thing with the grand vision that I could fill it with funny anecdotes and experiences relating to my life as a CPA; hence the name of the blog “Musings of a Bean Counter”. Alas, I have come to the realization that there is far too much truth to the stereotype of accountants as boring, uninteresting people.

Inspired by a blog by my sister-in-law, I am going to expound on the dark side of my teen music obsession. I must first explain a few things—I am the oldest of five children raised by two college-educated parents (Dad – PhD in Chemistry Mom – BS in Microbiology) who were both the first children in their families of six siblings. My parents had high expectations of their children and being the oldest meant I had to be the standard to which they could direct my four younger siblings.

So the fact that I was able to attend rock concerts is amazing since it didn’t fit the “normal” realm of a middle-class Mormon household. It started with an R.E.M concert at The Forum (now the Great Western Forum). This was several years before it became vogue for sports arenas to get corporate sponsors.

Anyway, that R.E.M. concert was my first of many in high school. We were way up in the rafters a long way from the stage. The smell of pot reeked at that altitude and based on recent scientific research related to second-hand smoke I may have been “second-hand stoned” by the end of that night. The concert was fabulous. I will always remember the stage being pitch black while the band was taking an intermission and then hearing Michael Stipe announce “This is the stupidest song ever written” followed by the opening stanza of “Stand”. The lights then flooded the stage and off they went. If you were an R.E.M. fan of that era you no doubt could do the absurd dance depicted in the music video.

That did it—I was hooked on live music concerts. I had a part-time job at a pizza restaurant and a paper route (yes at the ripe old age of 17 I still had a paper route—ooh another blog topic!) that provided the funding for these excursions.

Later that same year I went to see New Order perform, Love & Rockets, and back to see New Order again. The next year I saw Erasure and The Psychedelic Furs and finally the B-52s.

In my twenties I didn’t attend concerts, for what I believe are two reasons. One, Utah has not been a traditional stop for many big tours; and two, I was now a “starving student”. The lone exception is that I took my wife, Cynthia, to see Howard Jones for her college graduation present.

No rock concerts since then. I guess the accountant in me can’t bear to part with $50+ for each ticket to watch middle-aged rockers try to recreate the music of my teenage years.

My biggest regret is not seeing my beloved OMD play in concert. They opened, along with Thomas Dolby, for Depeche Mode on their ‘Music for the Masses’ tour and from multiple sources who attended “stole the show”.

Alas, these concert goings do not represent the “dark side” of my musical outlet. My friend, Chris Johnson, was my resource for all of this dark music—he had two older brothers. Chris lost his dad to cancer his freshman year of high school. As a result, they all received Social Security checks until they turned 18. This extra money enabled them countless trips to Rhino Records. I can remember going on occasion to check it out. Imagine the employees at a Hot Topic store only dirtier and scarier and the store itself is dark and industrial. That is what that place was like.

Anyway, I loved this music. It was a perfect outlet for me to express teenage angst about everything. Being a private person by nature most of this was enjoyed in my own bedroom. A luxury I will attribute to my current sanity (such as it is) after sharing a bedroom with my two younger brothers until the age of 14.

So in loving tribute to hours spent laying on my bed listening to cassette tapes recorded from vinyl records by my friend Chris Johnson, here are some of the great song titles from these dark bands (Why they never killed themselves I will never know!):

Bauhaus -Who Killed Mr. Moonlight and Terror Couple Kill Colonel
Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart
Visage - Fade to Grey and The Damned Don't Cry
Peter Murphy - Should the World Fail to Fall Apart
New Order - Shellshock and Murder
Love & Rockets - Waiting for the Flood

I could go on naming songs by The Cure, The Smiths, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Echo & The Bunnymen, Oingo Boingo, and Tears For Fears that fit this same criteria. So much of this music has been relatively lost in my regular playlist because it isn’t available online or I just am not that dark and haunted. I have a great job that fulfills my professional goals. I come home to a beautiful wife and three cute kids. They provide me with too much joy to get down too often.

There are days when I could just cuddle up in my bedroom and listen to this stuff to wallow in the mud after a long day at work and the craziness brought on by my children. At times like that I thank heaven for OMD, Erasure, Howard Jones, and female vocalists like Sarah McLachlin, Annie Lennox, Sheryl Crow, and others who provide me with “upper” music to keep me from killing one of them or myself!