I was Emily Brontë.

In the ’80s, you listened to tapes. I would have a list ready for Christmas and my birthday — December, and in May — of tapes I hadn’t bought yet: I got all the Zeppelin studio albums, but then just one of each of the “classic rock” albums, Who’s Next, Toys in the Attic, etc., because I couldn’t afford that much in terms of influence, since those days were over and I had to grow (the new music wasn’t as good, everybody knew that, but I got Don Henley’s Building the Perfect Beast, Pink Floyd’s Momentary Lapse of Reason, and The Cult’s Electric, say, among others, and listened to those anyway). Exceptions would be The Doors and Jimi Hendrix: something mystical about them, not just because they were music but outright, so I’d get more than a couple, Morrison Hotel and L.A. Woman, and Electric Ladyland and Live at Winterland and Band of Gypsies, to listen to in their entirety. It steels your mind, listening to full-blown works, and the rest of your day’s your day, so why not do it? That’s what I always thought.

I read a lot, too — but the Mad magazine books and subscriptions were misleading. (Later in life, I subscribed to Rolling Stone, The Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic Monthly, The Week, and WIRED at various point in my life — and then The Economist when I was older. It’s important to keep the mind churning, regardless of what any one article might say!) I read Judy Blume, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Superfudge and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, but then, everybody did. This lead into Stephen King when I was older, The Bachman Books and Skeleton Crew and Firestarter and Cujo (my aunt bought it for me — my parents wouldn’t let me read him yet, they didn’t know he was Charles Dickens or that Stanley Kubrick was Thackeray, and a Kubrick quote on a Jim Thompson novel scared the shit out of them!). I read Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, #1–33, My Code Name is Jonah and Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? and Space and Beyond and all that. I remember reading Edward Packard’s The Cave of Time when it first came out in a Scholastic Book Club — I was always getting in at the ground floor like that, it was a weird thing on my life. A kid in my dorm had Nevermind before it was on the radio, and I listened to The White Stripes a listening station in a record store before they quite blew up all over the place — White Blood Cells. Strange.