Even trying to set up the format of today’s blog post, I’m reminded that sometimes a person’s just got to let go of what they thought they wanted and go with what is happening instead. So this blog features a column.

Control, the flipside of chaos. A kind of Janus: beginnings, stepping through doors, portals, facing forward and facing backward.

In choosing the music business to work in, I knew there’d be chaos. In choosing journalism, I counted on guardrails. No matter how much insanity an artist, band, moment threw down, there would still be a story to be written and delivered by a certain time. Even though 9.5 times out of 10 I was convinced the thing would not get done and then the cascade of failure, firing, falling apart would follow.

It did mostly get done though, even as I slid my jitters under an It’s-all-good layer of cool. But underneath….whooo…the stress. I’ve always been a girl who gets to the airport too many hours before my flight. Just ask Dennis, whose MO used to be: show up with a reasonable cushion, wait until the announcement “anyone left in the boarding area,” get on plane, go. We’ve worked out a fine compromise. We still get there probably too early in order to avoid my going into paroxysms of inner-gut-gripping, teeth-clenching craziness, I’ve learned to curb my hovering tendencies. I stay seated until I’m invited to board, but I do spring to it when I hear the call. It’s not about securing an overhead bin. It’s more there’s something inside me that thinks I’ll be stopped from getting to where I want to be. I used to have the same itchy-crawly sensation around being on the list for a show. As soon as I’d get in line, I’d see the person with the clipboard and feel the uncertainty. Imposter syndrome’s cousin Anxiety would pull at my sleeve and mutter Do you know who I am? as more of a plaintive plea than a snarky statement.

When I was at SPIN mag and Elektra Records, a woman from MTV who I often traveled with was so much more casual around schedules than me. I’d call it borderline psychotically casual when I was honest. If we had a flight together, she’d arrange the car pickup with just enough time for us to be dropped off at the airport, revolve through the doors and hit the terminal hallway—me trying not to run like a madwoman and instead match her steps, then get to the gate (pre-ultra-screening days), with seconds to spare. Often before boarding, she’d ask if the flight was overbooked and volunteer to get bumped to the next flight for a free roud-trip voucher. I would stand there slowly dying inside. My nerves pounding out some Motley drum solo (I hate drum solos. And guitar solos. A topic for another time.) complete with spinning upside down and quiet nausea. I never cracked and yelled, “Let’s get on the mutherfkn plane NOW,” which was what I was screaming inside, because that would have seemed nuts. Uncool. Uptight.

One of the quirks(?) Bob Guccioune Jr. had as owner and puppeteer of SPIN was to throw the editors and writers into random situations with random people and see how we’d do. Like a publishing snowglobe, he’d drop us into unfamiliar surroundings (see blog post: Travel Edition for Tampa drop), then shake things up to see where they’d settle. Looking back, it said a lot about advertisers, and publishing, at the time that none of the money honchos balked at some of these adventures: Send the editors far and wide, bring in Saturday Night Live and Spike Lee (not together) to guest edit an issue, take the staff to a college to set up shop for a month.

The University of Missouri in Columbia was the scene of our first college issue. It has one of the top-tier journalism programs in the country. And for some reason it made sense for the staff of SPIN to basically move there for a month so the students could help us produce the March 1991 issue. R.E.M. were on the cover because of course they were. College. Alternative. Those terms were important back then. I remember the blustery sense of self-confidence as the staff arrived in front of our Hampton Inn, rolling out of the mini-van like a band of unruly layabouts, half-zipped duffle bags and bleary drunkeness because, well, airplanes and cocktails always seemed necessary. If I remember correctly (and that’s a very big IF), one of the advisors from the journalism department was there to meet the lot of us editors, writers, managing staff, and art folks to make sure we got checked in smoothly. Again, if memory serves (out-clause here), Bob and one of the other notoriously creepy, older editor/writers, was already in full lewd-comment mode about the women they were looking forward to meeting at that night’s mixer. The part of me that held all my outrage had checked out of my consciousness months earlier, so the back&forth bounced against my skull with a dull thud. As did the elbow-in-my-side “maybe you’ll find a frat boy” comment.

I certainly didn’t know what a serious journalism program looked like. I’d started at CalState Long Beach, which was great, but completed the lion’s share of my degree at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, which was wonderful, but not traditional: a class of seven in a pilot program that had a lot to do with interning in the industry rather than studying in the classroom. Mizzou, as they call U of Missouri, was formidable in its journalism reputation. But still, we SPIN folks raged against the correctness of it. The lecherous editor set up an interview session in his hotel room to find a research assistant for the three weeks we’d be there. The position was only open to women. He interviewed them one at a time, making the women line up in the hotel hallway while he brought them in person by person. My closest friend at the magazine and I watched and discussed this wrongness, both ashamed, yet neither doing anything about it immediately. He’d commented (not wrongly) that Bob would think it all funny (which he did). My friend though, to his enormous credit, finally went up to women in line and told them the position wasn’t worth it and that they’d do better coming to the rest of us directly with story ideas or whatever they felt they wanted to do to help us out. Gawd knew we needed it. He was a good man (hopefully still is).

On that trip, my ability to wrap my arms around the vessel of control shattered neatly and cleanly: I couldn’t manage the schedule we’d set out for the students because it was bonkers and we were crap-ass at assigning things in any sort of chain of command. What was one day a story around on-campus bands became instead a story around on-campus bands at parties…at frat houses…at sororities. Bob changing it up to make it sexier (his word) every five minutes. The professors quickly became frustrated with us. We laughed it off. I felt more and more uncomfortable with the peak of that discomfort culminating in an intro to journalism class where I’d been asked to speak on my career. How I got there. During the Q&A I realized how out of my depth I was. They wanted to know about libel. Investigative reporting. Real stuff that I didn’t know or follow. And I kept telling stories, but sometimes when you say things out loud that you think are funny, there quickly follows a reading of the room as you watch the words land. My tales were not funny. Kind of tawdry and not landing lightly. They had more the sound of the thud of inappropriate. And even though I knew I wasn’t really that person, I’d figured that was the person I was expected to be. The face I was meant to show to the world. The one I was hired to hold. Naturally I found soon enough how untrue that was. A realization that came full force when I faced Bob in a courtroom years later. That was a doorway into my next enlightenment. And a soon-enough post for the future.