JON ZAL

Your front-row seat to my nervous breakdown

Subject: No cellphone

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To: [Lots of people]

Hi, this is Jon. I can’t get to the phone right now because it shattered into a million pieces on Interstate 95 early last evening. Its pieces are intermingled with those of the six-hour-old BlackBerry Curve that I received from my employer yesterday. I left both on the roof of my car while transporting my family from point A to point B. Total estimated retail value: $700.

If you need to reach me, please call me on my home phone … which I probably won’t answer, because I’m busy throwing up.

Thanks.

Battered Van Halen-fan syndrome

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Jon & Ed 5150

Look, I appreciate your concern, but, really, I’m OK. He’s not going to hurt me again.

Yes, I know it’s not the first time he’s said he’d change … not the first time he’s said it won’t happen again … that he’ll stop drinking … that I can trust him … that he really loves me. I know.

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I propose a toast to you, my readers

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So, yesterday morning, I went for a short run (redundant, really, since “short” is the only kind of run I ever seem to go for, if at all), and returned home feeling all fit and spry — and hungry. This last part is always a challenge, because the extent of my culinary abilities is limited to boiling and toasting — or so I thought. Turns out I can remove “toasting” from my cooking résumé.

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I like this Army better

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Army of Anyone

A few weeks back, my workweek began with an assignment that kicked much ass. I was invited to attend an exclusive, in-studio performance by Army of Anyone, a new rock group that features Filter frontman Richard Patrick, Stone Temple Pilots members/brothers Robert DeLeo (bass) and Dean DeLeo (guitar), and former David Lee Roth Band drummer Ray Luzier. The show took place at Boston radio station WBCN.

Following the performance, I got to sit down with Richard and Robert, whom I interviewed for about 40 minutes. Though I’ve done a number of interviews in the past, this was my first using a digital recorder, which records the audio input onto a compact flash memory card. Very cool … except for the part where I apparently did not familiarize myself as thoroughly as I should have with this new-fangled contraption.

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Gilford Cabo Wabo, NH

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Cabo Wabo, NH

As anyone who has spent more than 60 seconds in my presence can tell you, I have several yarns I like to spin about exciting moments I have had with the members of Van Halen. The man standing between my wife and me in the photo above is Kevin Dugan, a good friend to whom I owe a great deal of credit for quite a few of those experiences—the latest of which took place last week, and buried the needle deep into the red on the “OMFG-That-Was-So-Cool!”-ometer.

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Van Halen (or, The Band That Ate My Life)

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On the first day of the first class of my freshman year in college, my College Writing 101 professor instructed us to go home that weekend and write a paper about the person whom we would most like to meet if given the chance.

And I could have bullshitted him. I could have written about wanting to meet JFK or Martin Luther King Jr. or some other revered, sociopolitical icon … but I wasn’t an 18-year-old freshman just out of high school; I was a 22-year-old freshman who had recently spent nearly four years in the Army, and my inclination to sling bullshit in order to impress a college professor was, by that point, quite nonexistent. And as I looked down at the blank notebook in front of me that weekend, I saw stretching out before me four long years of higher education … and I knew that the only way I was going to make it to the finish line was to figure out how to marry my own personal interests to my academic pursuits.

So I wrote the “I want to meet Eddie Van Halen” paper.

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Home again, home again, jiggety jig

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When last we spoke, I was about to depart for a supposed “secret” Beastie Boys concert. I’m making those little air-quote thingies with my fingers around the word “secret” because, when I showed up outside the venue about an hour and 15 minutes before the gate opened, the line already stretched around the block.

(If you need the visual, and feel like clicking “Next” 21 times, check out photo 22 of 59 in this photo gallery.)

Said the Austin American-Statesman newspaper:

The biggest surprise acts, such as the Beastie Boys at Stubb’s on Thursday, were swarmed by badge-danglers and wristband-wearers.

Well, kids, if being a badge-dangler is wrong, then I don’t wanna be right, for ’twas my dangling badge that got the K-I-D into that swarmed Beasties gig, whereupon my badge-dangling was surpassed only by my rump-shaking.

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