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[Eventually, this little tale will evolve into a much more complex piece that will most likely be called "Sean and 'The River'"...part of the Storytime with Uncle Pegritz tales that will eventually grace Pegritz.com--but in the meantime, enjoy this little trial-run in which I basically just get my ideas down on paper.]
One of the weirdest things about being a college teacher at a campus spitting distance from the highschool you grew up in is that sometimes you find that some of your students were once your classmates, or at the very least graduated maybe a year or two different from you. Penn State Fayette has a really well-renowned nursing program, and a lot of folks who graduated from Tri-Valley High School (my alma mater) in the early '90s became LPNs, medical assistants, and the like at various other schools and are now coming back to score an RN degree from our nursing school. Last semester, for instance, I had a student, Tracy, whom I've literally known since kindergarten; she's an optician now and she's going back to school to work on a degree in medical assisting. This semester, I found out that one of my current students, Michelle Volek, graduated from Tri-Valley in 1990, one year ahead of me, and she's now back to upgrade her LPNity into full-fledged Registered Nursery.
Naturally, we found ourselves talking about folks that we might have known in highschool, and for some reason, when she mentioned living near Fairchance I brought up the name Sean Matzus--a name I haven't had much need to utter more than...hell, two or three times in the last five years.
"The Sean whose mom was a schoolteacher?" Michelle asked.
"Yeah, that one."
"Yeah, I know him! I didn't know him in highschool or anything, but I run into him sometimes at Hutchinson Sportsmen's club....He goes out there to see this one band play."
"Sean's back in the area?" I asked in disbelief. Last I heard of him, he was living in Texas, driving a dumptruck for a living....
"Yeah. He lives somewhere in town now. Has a baby. Lives with the mother, but he's not married. Doesn't really like her, I think. I think he works for Hranec, now." Hranec's an airconditioning/heating company, I think.
"Ain't that just the drizzlin' shits."
We didn't talk much more after that--not because of the drizzlin' shits, remark, but because I had to get into my job at the newspaper--but...the more I thought about what Michelle had said about Sean, the more melancholy I began to feel.
Sean was probably my best friend in highschool. At least, my best friend for my last two or three years of highschool. He was the first early-'90s pre-grunge "alternakid" I ever met, and I met him when I was fourteen, the year my school district consolidated all its various schools into one big system and suddenly I found myself rubbing elbows with kids from miles away. Sean was a horror freak like I was, and he dug a lot of the same bands I did: oldskool metal like Voivod and Iron Maiden, 80s synthpop, goth rock like The Cure and Sisters of Mercy (though back then, we had no idea what "goth rock" was, we just called those kind of bands "shoegazer" or "depressing rock"), plus that which eventually became known as "alternative" rock--REM, Nirvana, etcetera. Sean introduced me to Clive Barker's writing. Sean introduced me to Ministry, by one day, in eleventh grade, handing me his CD of The Mind is a terrible Thing to Taste and telling me that, since I liked metal and often talked about how much I liked machine sounds, I would completely love Ministry. Hell, two years later, he introduced me to Skinny Puppy and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult and taught me that "industrial" was an actual type of music, not some throwaway term I sometimes heard on 120 Minutes. Sean used to date my friend April Trees, whom I used to think was one of the hottest, sweetest, nicest girls alive.
I wanted to be Sean, quite simply.
He shaved the sides of his head and owned and skateboard and listened to The Ramones and Infectious Grooves. He wore Doc Martens. He had his own car and he slept with girls.
We started Penn State Fayette together in the Fall of 1991, both as English majors, both intending to eventually become English teachers, college-level or otherwise. We listened to the same music, grew our hair long, talked about starting our own bands....Sean played guitar--something I couldn't do then, nor can do now--and had a band: My Beautiful Love Sofa. Only ever played a single gig at PSU Fayette, if I recall, but he was making music and I wanted to do that, too. He knew Cool People, and Cool People liked him. He was grunge before grunge became cool. He was alternative long before Alternative Nation on MTV.
I was never really anything to him, but I didn't know that then. I was the kid he hung out with sometimes on campus, but of course never invited me to any parties with the other Cool Alternative Kids. By the Fall of 1992, he was no longer an English major--he wanted to major in film, and do cool things like make art, and powerful music.
He dated the girl I was in love with--a twiggy, bignosed little twit named Julie--then dumped her and took her back in a cycle that eventually repeated a hundred times...but that's a whoooooooole different story. He had followers. We called them Seanenites. Highschool kids who looked up to him for what was the new, cool music to wear, what were the new, cool fashions to wear. He was a leader. I was always just a follower, and I learned much from him.
If it weren't for Sean, I wouldn't know who the hell Skinny Puppy was. Or Ministry. TKK. Front Line Assembly. The Buzzcocks. Helmet. Any of those bands....I wouldn't have ever heard of Clive Barker or Arthur Rimbaud. I wouldn't know how much love can strangle the life out of you, or fill you with the most blissful misery--the kind you write about, and write about well. I wouldn't know I was capable of making music on my own. Sean told me about the ancient MOD programs I first began using on my ancient 386 computer to make electronic music. He thought they were stupid, but they stuck with me allright.
Today, I teach at the campus he and I started college at in the first place. I know damnear all there is to know about industrial music, especially Skinny Puppy and Ministry. My band, Nyarlathotep (still wearing the same name I came up with one day with Sean in the library at Penn State Fayette), has put out two decently successful EPs of music, and will soon be releasing a full-length album--or, at least, a reconstruction of the album we sort-of released five years ago. I've written stories, I've edited a magazine for five years, I'm an accomplished graphic designer and illustrator, and I am completely free. My destiny is entirely my own.
Sean drives big, smelly trucks for a living.
He has a kid and lives with a woman he doesn't even like enough to marry.
Far as I know, he's never made a film. Never taught a class. Never even finished college.
Who knows what kind of music he listens to now. Probably all his old Nirvana albums. On endless repeat.
The thing is...he probably makes more money than me. And he's probably happy, or at least I certainly hope he is. Even just a little. There's no dishonor in driving truck, gods know.... But, nonetheless, as I was listening to Springsteen's "The River" today, I couldn't help but think of Sean. Driving his HVAC truck down the endless dessicated riverbed of the dreams he and I cooked up back in highschool.
For all I know, his life may be exactly where he wants it. Some people can do that, you know...give up on old goals, set new ones for themselves, settle for much less than everything they wanted in those heady days of youth before reality settled in. Maybe I'm the loser here: still staggering futureward with my head swimming in dreams like glue-fumes, drizzy with all the impossible things I want to accomplish yet, childless, wifeless, medical-insuranceless, that bigmouthed cowboy in the corner of the Goth club with his laptop case full of noise and half-finished monster novels. It's all just perspective, ultimately, but....
I reached. I caught a handful of what I was reaching for...enough to matter, anyway. Enough to say I accomplished just what I wanted to do: teach college by the time I was 30. Put out an album or two. Make something lasting, something that did not exist before I imagined it out of the aether. When it comes time for me to lie down and die, I'll know I've at least done that. I created myself. I follow no one anymore.
Sean didn't. Where are the Seanenites now? The Docs? The edgy, new, hot CDs and the skateboard? The guitar? Memories and boxes in the attic, probably.
"And man, that was all she wrote...."
One of the weirdest things about being a college teacher at a campus spitting distance from the highschool you grew up in is that sometimes you find that some of your students were once your classmates, or at the very least graduated maybe a year or two different from you. Penn State Fayette has a really well-renowned nursing program, and a lot of folks who graduated from Tri-Valley High School (my alma mater) in the early '90s became LPNs, medical assistants, and the like at various other schools and are now coming back to score an RN degree from our nursing school. Last semester, for instance, I had a student, Tracy, whom I've literally known since kindergarten; she's an optician now and she's going back to school to work on a degree in medical assisting. This semester, I found out that one of my current students, Michelle Volek, graduated from Tri-Valley in 1990, one year ahead of me, and she's now back to upgrade her LPNity into full-fledged Registered Nursery.
Naturally, we found ourselves talking about folks that we might have known in highschool, and for some reason, when she mentioned living near Fairchance I brought up the name Sean Matzus--a name I haven't had much need to utter more than...hell, two or three times in the last five years.
"The Sean whose mom was a schoolteacher?" Michelle asked.
"Yeah, that one."
"Yeah, I know him! I didn't know him in highschool or anything, but I run into him sometimes at Hutchinson Sportsmen's club....He goes out there to see this one band play."
"Sean's back in the area?" I asked in disbelief. Last I heard of him, he was living in Texas, driving a dumptruck for a living....
"Yeah. He lives somewhere in town now. Has a baby. Lives with the mother, but he's not married. Doesn't really like her, I think. I think he works for Hranec, now." Hranec's an airconditioning/heating company, I think.
"Ain't that just the drizzlin' shits."
We didn't talk much more after that--not because of the drizzlin' shits, remark, but because I had to get into my job at the newspaper--but...the more I thought about what Michelle had said about Sean, the more melancholy I began to feel.
Sean was probably my best friend in highschool. At least, my best friend for my last two or three years of highschool. He was the first early-'90s pre-grunge "alternakid" I ever met, and I met him when I was fourteen, the year my school district consolidated all its various schools into one big system and suddenly I found myself rubbing elbows with kids from miles away. Sean was a horror freak like I was, and he dug a lot of the same bands I did: oldskool metal like Voivod and Iron Maiden, 80s synthpop, goth rock like The Cure and Sisters of Mercy (though back then, we had no idea what "goth rock" was, we just called those kind of bands "shoegazer" or "depressing rock"), plus that which eventually became known as "alternative" rock--REM, Nirvana, etcetera. Sean introduced me to Clive Barker's writing. Sean introduced me to Ministry, by one day, in eleventh grade, handing me his CD of The Mind is a terrible Thing to Taste and telling me that, since I liked metal and often talked about how much I liked machine sounds, I would completely love Ministry. Hell, two years later, he introduced me to Skinny Puppy and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult and taught me that "industrial" was an actual type of music, not some throwaway term I sometimes heard on 120 Minutes. Sean used to date my friend April Trees, whom I used to think was one of the hottest, sweetest, nicest girls alive.
I wanted to be Sean, quite simply.
He shaved the sides of his head and owned and skateboard and listened to The Ramones and Infectious Grooves. He wore Doc Martens. He had his own car and he slept with girls.
We started Penn State Fayette together in the Fall of 1991, both as English majors, both intending to eventually become English teachers, college-level or otherwise. We listened to the same music, grew our hair long, talked about starting our own bands....Sean played guitar--something I couldn't do then, nor can do now--and had a band: My Beautiful Love Sofa. Only ever played a single gig at PSU Fayette, if I recall, but he was making music and I wanted to do that, too. He knew Cool People, and Cool People liked him. He was grunge before grunge became cool. He was alternative long before Alternative Nation on MTV.
I was never really anything to him, but I didn't know that then. I was the kid he hung out with sometimes on campus, but of course never invited me to any parties with the other Cool Alternative Kids. By the Fall of 1992, he was no longer an English major--he wanted to major in film, and do cool things like make art, and powerful music.
He dated the girl I was in love with--a twiggy, bignosed little twit named Julie--then dumped her and took her back in a cycle that eventually repeated a hundred times...but that's a whoooooooole different story. He had followers. We called them Seanenites. Highschool kids who looked up to him for what was the new, cool music to wear, what were the new, cool fashions to wear. He was a leader. I was always just a follower, and I learned much from him.
If it weren't for Sean, I wouldn't know who the hell Skinny Puppy was. Or Ministry. TKK. Front Line Assembly. The Buzzcocks. Helmet. Any of those bands....I wouldn't have ever heard of Clive Barker or Arthur Rimbaud. I wouldn't know how much love can strangle the life out of you, or fill you with the most blissful misery--the kind you write about, and write about well. I wouldn't know I was capable of making music on my own. Sean told me about the ancient MOD programs I first began using on my ancient 386 computer to make electronic music. He thought they were stupid, but they stuck with me allright.
Today, I teach at the campus he and I started college at in the first place. I know damnear all there is to know about industrial music, especially Skinny Puppy and Ministry. My band, Nyarlathotep (still wearing the same name I came up with one day with Sean in the library at Penn State Fayette), has put out two decently successful EPs of music, and will soon be releasing a full-length album--or, at least, a reconstruction of the album we sort-of released five years ago. I've written stories, I've edited a magazine for five years, I'm an accomplished graphic designer and illustrator, and I am completely free. My destiny is entirely my own.
Sean drives big, smelly trucks for a living.
He has a kid and lives with a woman he doesn't even like enough to marry.
Far as I know, he's never made a film. Never taught a class. Never even finished college.
Who knows what kind of music he listens to now. Probably all his old Nirvana albums. On endless repeat.
The thing is...he probably makes more money than me. And he's probably happy, or at least I certainly hope he is. Even just a little. There's no dishonor in driving truck, gods know.... But, nonetheless, as I was listening to Springsteen's "The River" today, I couldn't help but think of Sean. Driving his HVAC truck down the endless dessicated riverbed of the dreams he and I cooked up back in highschool.
For all I know, his life may be exactly where he wants it. Some people can do that, you know...give up on old goals, set new ones for themselves, settle for much less than everything they wanted in those heady days of youth before reality settled in. Maybe I'm the loser here: still staggering futureward with my head swimming in dreams like glue-fumes, drizzy with all the impossible things I want to accomplish yet, childless, wifeless, medical-insuranceless, that bigmouthed cowboy in the corner of the Goth club with his laptop case full of noise and half-finished monster novels. It's all just perspective, ultimately, but....
I reached. I caught a handful of what I was reaching for...enough to matter, anyway. Enough to say I accomplished just what I wanted to do: teach college by the time I was 30. Put out an album or two. Make something lasting, something that did not exist before I imagined it out of the aether. When it comes time for me to lie down and die, I'll know I've at least done that. I created myself. I follow no one anymore.
Sean didn't. Where are the Seanenites now? The Docs? The edgy, new, hot CDs and the skateboard? The guitar? Memories and boxes in the attic, probably.
"And man, that was all she wrote...."
