Last week’s call for content for 90s nostalgia pieces shifts now to the band New Order, and today’s featured writer Ross Murray. Ross helped me a lot when I started on WordPress and has promoted and supported many other would-be writers, a real mensch. I enjoy his bent take on life, and I’m about to enjoy his new book, which you can also link to at the end of his story below.
Note: this series ends Saturday, and I regret I’m no longer accepting submissions.
Regret
by Ross Murray
I was working in production at a suburban Montreal newspaper named, appropriately, The Suburban. It was 1991, and our first daughter had been born that summer – not an accident, we would later say to her, but a surprise, like we’d won something. We were awfully young.
After earning my first freelance writing gigs and in a fit of self-delusion, I quit the paper. The freelance gigs didn’t necessarily follow.
By the fall of 1992, things were feeling desperate. Claiming I knew Illustrator (I did not), I had faked my way into a design firm ruled over by a man whose managerial style could be described as yelling and sweating. It wouldn’t last. I had to find a real job.
Thankfully, I had enough bylines by then to apply for a job as news editor at The Stanstead Journal, a small English weekly on the Quebec-Vermont border. With virtually no newsroom experience, I got the job.
That newsroom, it would turn out, would consist of me and a part-timer who would fax in her copy, so really just me. It was that kind of newspaper. The entire staff could fit in my office. The Journal was located in half of a building known as Pat’s Mini-Mall. Pat was the landlord. He lived next door. He could fit in my office too.
There was a steep curve. I needed to learn the territory, the players, the issues. I had to learn layout. And I had to learn that this was not just a job but an institution. The Journal was nearly 150 years old, the voice of the English community, an advocate for the little guy, the place you went to for the social notes of the Stanstead County Ladies Institute.
It was also not 9-5. There were meetings to attend, festivals to cover, people to phone after supper, ploughing matches to photograph. I had to develop my own film and print my own pictures. I had to leave my wife and young child home alone. A lot. There were arguments about whether I needed to go out or whether I wanted to. When I think back on it, of course I never needed to, but I wanted to do a good job, so I needed to.
Among the late-night jobs was running the paste-ups to the printing press an hour down the road. The Journal was printed by our rivals, the daily Sherbrooke Record, but we were allies in the Battle for English Survival, so we were friendly rivals. While my paper was on the press, I would hang out in the Record newsroom (a real newsroom). Then we would throw the bundles into the back of the Nissan van and back to the border I would go.
En route, I would drop off bundles at local post offices for morning delivery or at the homes of the few carriers we still had. It was a twisting route through the back roads. Sometimes I would stop for coffee (“un petit wakeup” a French clerk once said to me, though I thought he said “un petit whacko.”)
And always there was radio. Even in this musical wasteland of top 40, classic rock and country, there was always something to find on those lonely Tuesday nights, most often on a French community station. The DJ – a young girl at this hour – did what community DJs have done for all time, that is play her favourites over and over. For her, this meant Jane’s Addiction, The Violent Femmes, Electronic, The Cure, New Order.
There were snowy nights when I wasn’t sure I would make it home. There were nights when I would go over and over the crisis that had occurred in our small but volatile newsroom. There were nights I could barely keep my eyes open. But the moment I hold in my head is driving from the Massawippi turnoff, down to Ayer’s Cliff, the moment the fields and trees transition into village, the headlights reflecting off the guard rails at the bridge. New Order’s “Regret” is playing on the radio. Warm power chords, jangles in the night, Peter Hook’s bittersweet bass, all making me feel not so alone at night while my family is at home sleeping without me. It makes me feel hopeful that they’ll forgive me for all the things I’ve already missed and all the things I’m about to.
Ross’s debut novel, A Hole in the Ground, is set in the nineties and involves a weekly newspaper called The Beaverly Modicum. You can order his book here.
I enjoyed this series, Bill and nice piece, Ross. I wish I could have contributed, but I was coming out of the Army in the early 90s, which was a world removed from pop culture (before everything could be accessed online). I’ve been about a decade behind ever since.
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Thanks, Michelle. My original submission was about how the 90s, culturally at least, mostly passed me by, due to work and family. One of the beauties of everything being online is that I can catch up.
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And this is maybe the first time a generation can ‘go back’ in that self-serve fashion, to experience what they missed. Kind of strange, like going to the library but never leaving your house. I liked the imagery in this, especially you driving in the snow, but mainly getting to read a ‘straight’ piece by Ross, despite how much I enjoy the satire.
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At one point I thought for sure I would write the great Gen-X novel, but Douglas Coupland had better hair. Ironically, now he has none.
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The great Gen-X novel may be more interesting if we wait another 10 years. (This may not apply, but I like Alan Alda in Crimes & Misdemeanors saying, as a complete ass, that comedy is tragedy + time.)
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It’s amazing now to be able to catch everything online, because 25 years ago, it was easier to live in a bubble. Now my un-hip bubble is of my own choosing.
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Hey thanks Michelle, glad you are enjoying it. I have a few more pieces scheduled through this Saturday, so tune in tomorrow and again if you can, and through the week! I have a piece in mind for your contest, though I’m not sure it meets the rules (not enough joy in it). I’m working it up today, and if nothing else, it may serve as an advertisement for your contest. I’ll send it to you and you can see what you think. Thanks for reading, sorry you missed the 90s so to speak, but thanks for doing what you did then. I’m sure it had its own culture, with screaming and guns and stage dives. Bill
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Glad to hear you’re submitting something – I always enjoy your writing. As for guns and stage dives, it was more like smoking and standing around outside the motor pool for days on end.
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I moved to Europe in late ’83 and I feel like I’m missing pieces through to 1994. Musically I was able to keep up but a biweekly purchase of the International Herald Tribune was not enough to keep up with culturally – TV Shows, Movies, especially the ones that didn’t translate well. You can’t capture the zeitgeist (bonus?) via the internet.
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Ha, bonus. Poltergeist?
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The movie (’82) or my apparition in the comments?
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Ha, works both ways! That film found it’s zeitgeist, or vice versa.
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Reblogged this on Drinking Tips for Teens and commented:
Bill at Pinklightsabre put out a call for 90s nostalgia. Bill and I have chatted a bit about music over the years, so I was happy to submit this song-triggered piece and indulge in my moody side. If you haven’t read Bill’s superb, thought-provoking prose, do yourself a favour and follow his blog immediately!
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Ross: Love your “fit of self-delusion” that took you on this path. I also think I worked for that guy who yelled and sweated.
Your final paragraph is beautiful.
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If I think about it, pretty much everything leads from that decision, for better or worse. It’s something to consider, eh? What decision led you to now.
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You should just go write Cloud Atlas.
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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…or something like that.
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Delightful and very real. thank you.
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That’s Ross! Flying without a hairnet and sometimes, less.
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I enjoyed this piece. My favorite line is this: “When I think back on it, of course I never needed to, but I wanted to do a good job, so I needed to.” That just says so much right there.
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What we think we need and how we identify with that and where we hide. Maybe —
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There are all sorts of things I do for my job that I don’t need to do. But I want to do them to be the best attorney I can be and best employee I can be. So I need to do them. And they are starting to drive me crazy.
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Sounds like a book in the making!
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It’s like job titles: it doesn’t matter what they call you, you’re still doing the same damn thing.
And thanks.
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This post makes me wistful for driving around with just radio. The last line in this is like a punch in the gut that feels good. I’ve also got Ross’ book and will start it later this week, so pretty excited about that.
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That’s an era you can’t replace with Sirius or satellite radio, or MP3s GOD I SOUND OLD. I’m moderating because Ross should be at his desk now, working, 3 or 4 hours ahead. Not looking at his feeds.
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Seriously.
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This was nice, Ross. And it explains those lines around your eyes. The ones one your forehead are from the teenagers, that’s a given.
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Those aren’t lines; those are Intensity Rays!
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Edit: “on” your forehead. (makes extra cup of coffee)
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I get that same problem with too much coffee.
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Well, slide that mug over here, son….
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