None of This Rocks: A Memoir (Joe Trohman, Hachette, 2022)

    The last time I saw Joe Trohman in person was at the Fireside Bowl at a THROWDOWN / BLEEDING THROUGH / NO WARNING show in December 2001 when he gave me the CDR of the new band he was doing with Pete Wentz. He said they made the name three words so Matt Groening wouldn’t sue them. In the two or three years prior to that, we spent a lot of time hanging out at shows, listening to music, and playing video games. He was one of only a few friends at my school who were straight edge and actively involved in a scene beyond our suburbs. We had bonded so much that my mom felt the need to intervene with a passive aggressive note. 

[image removed to save myself from embarrassment.]

    I wish I had other mementoes from our friendship. Given that cameras were yet to become ubiquitous, so we don’t have random candid photos, and that we lived in the same area, so we didn’t exchange letters, there’s not much else to show from our time together. Even his signature in my yearbook was of the nickname some of the older Chicago dudes gave him instead of his given name.

[image removed to preserve some mystique.]

    We were only one grade level apart, but he was chronologically more than a year younger than me. This age gap makes no difference these days, but reading his account of his pre-FALL OUT BOY days in this book makes me scratch my head at times. Was he really only 15 when he scabbed for ARMA ANGELUS? He would have been 15 until September 2000, so the story of Pete Wentz convincing Joe’s mom to let him go on that tour would have happened in March of 2000. This was a time when we were hanging out pretty frequently and I don’t remember him ever talking about it, so I don’t know what to think about the credibility of this anecdote. It seems a little more likely that he would have scabbed for them in the summer of 2001 on the tour with 7 ANGELS 7 PLAGUES, when he would have been 16 and starting his senior year in the fall. In the end, the accuracy of this detail has zero impact on his subsequent musical success and on my life in general, but engaging in the performance of being correct after the fact in this review sure made me feel good for about five minutes.

    I selfishly read the book for the possibility that my name or a vague recollection of an older, taller friend would grace the page. It was not to be. I supposed that makes me one of the vapid and faceless moonlighters from high school who were not long for the scene, as he tells it. He does recall the kids who were a grade above me treating him with kindness before brutally telling him that not one of them actually liked him as a friend. Which one of these guys do you think best matches his description of being the “portly, pig-nosed, Buzz McCallister look-alike” who delivered that line?

[images removed for privacy and the presumption of innocence.]

    It was hard to read that part, given that I remember how he looked up to those guys and how they seemed to welcome him just the same. That ease with making friends seemed to have served him well with connecting with the scene elders in the city as he was putting together the idea for FALL OUT BOY. He was the one who introduced himself to me at the RACE TRAITOR / BURN IT DOWN / GOOD CLEAN FUN / BROTHER’S KEEPER / The JUDAS FACTOR show on March 6, 1999 at the Fireside. (Let me know if you have the flyer for this show.)

    Later that year, he was doing an online zine called A Helping Hand and he interviewed CLUBBER LANG and FIGURE FOUR over email. I was supposed to help with the zine in some way by doing show reviews but I never did. I think he gave me the nickname of the Angry Green Giant and used a picture of Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z as my avatar. He also put his own spin on Adele Collins’ mainstay question from I Stand Alone by asking both bands “When was the last time you made someone cry?” If you’re not familiar, all of the interviews in ISA featured the questions “When was the last time you cried?” and “Pick a scar and tell a story about it.” Steve Wiltse memorably used them in his interview with The A-TEAM in Town of Hardcore #6. In light of the way he was so clearly driven to do more than fuck around in the suburbs and go off to college, it makes sense that he wouldn’t include these experiences in his memoir. They probably don’t register because they were just part of him finding his way.

    As for the content related to the band that made him famous, the book is informative without being boring. Some of the writing probably sounds better in an audiobook or stand-up performance because the jokes don’t quite land in print. The reference to a bat mitzvah being a good deed involving purchasing his father one of Hank Aaron’s bats is indeed hilarious (i.e., it's a mitzvah related to a bat, not a bat mitzvah in the sense of a Jewish girl reaching religious maturity). The fact that his mom later gave the bat to a contractor who was admiring it while working on their house tells you a lot about how she navigated the world and caused problems for their family.

    Rock memoirs aren’t a genre I read extensively, but it is really interesting to hear him explain how dissatisfied he was with the band’s last two albums because they featured so little in the way of guitars. That and his candid discussion of struggles with chemical dependency are honest without being gratuitously depraved. As he says in the title, none of this experience rocks. He has not always enjoyed the road to fame but it seems like he has at least found some kind of comfort in it.

(This is a lightly edited version of a review that originally appeared in issue #2 of the zine Anxiety’s False Promise, published February 2023.)

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Unpacking (Witch Beam / Humble Bundle, 2021)

    Like many undergraduates in training to become a teacher, I read and reread and discussed and wrote about Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 article “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” It was a pivotal text in my cohort of mostly white students who aspired to be secondary English teachers. A few years and a master’s degree later, I thought I knew better than my past self and anyone who would bring it up as a relevant critique of the world as it was then. We had a Black president at the time! Hadn’t a lot changed in the U.S. with regard to race relations by 2009? I was colorblind, so everyone else must have been, too… right?

    Man, being in your mid-twenties and living in your own apartment for the first time leads to some pretty foolish conclusions. As the saying goes, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” I even went so far as to proclaim the surely-we-have-moved-on argument on a message board for the local punk scene. I should have been ostracized immediately. We are all for the better that I have grown and matured since then. I have as much to pack as almost anyone—just about every privilege imaginable.

XXX

    When our family bought our OLED Switch, my kid was unfamiliar with playing console games, but just the right age to be interested in them. I wanted to share the joy that games could bring, so I searched up lists of games that would be good for a young-ish child to play on the Switch. Literacy wasn’t an obstacle, but reaction time and challenge were. One of the lists I’d found mentioned the recently released Unpacking by Witch Beam as an option. The description of a “zen puzzle game” seemed like it would work for me even if it didn’t for my intended audience. There was no reason for me to have had any concern, though, as the controls are intuitive, the pace is chill, the music delightful, and the sound design exquisite. It’s a game with a low barrier to entry and a high level of polish.

    Really, what could be easier than opening boxes and putting away one’s personal effects? There’s very little that needs to be explained in the game itself. The low amount of text is not just a positive aspect of the game’s accessibility, it allows for the narrative to proceed through what I’ve often heard called environmental storytelling. That is, when the programmer doesn’t use dialogue, voiceover, or vignettes to explain that “hey, something important has happened here,” or “this cause has many effects.” In a game where the action is the repetitively calming process of opening a box, assessing its contents, and placing them in a logical location, the storytelling happens through the objects themselves and the nature of the rooms and buildings the character occupies. Which objects will appear throughout the eight levels (representing 21 years of time) you spend unpacking? What does it mean if certain objects obtain wear-and-tear befitting their use? Why do certain objects get pride of place in some homes but not others? What does your character do for a living? What are her interests outside of work? Who is important to her? What happens if you try to put the toaster in the empty sink (just-for-a-second-I-swear-I’ll-put-it-somewhere-else-it’s-just-so-cramped-in-here)?

    You’ll have time to ponder these questions as you meditatively open each box, select each item, and consider its placement. Although you begin in your childhood bedroom, you’ll soon have a larger place to inhabit, with roommates or significant others sharing the space. Most of the time, your packing job is logical: the boxes that appear in the bathroom mostly have toiletries. Not always. There will be times that you wonder why a book or a kitchen utensil is in with the soap and shampoo. Sometimes, the objects are difficult to identify. These moments are where the game can be most enjoyable. When I was faced with an unknown object, I would place it on different surfaces and listen closely to the sound it made. That’s right—the foley, the sound design in this game is beyond belief. A pair of nail clippers will make different sounds depending on whether you place them on the bathroom sink, the medicine cabinet, the bathmat, a couch, the stove, or the kitchen cabinet. These subtle sound clues are often enough to give a hint of the true identity of the object you’re placing. If not, then the game indicates when you’ve misplaced an item, but only when you have unpacked all of the boxes in the level. There are definitely some objects I still can’t identify, but I know to place them in the kitchen or the living room whenever they appear in my virtual hands.

    In addition to playing as a woman whose minoritized faith and sexuality are revealed further into the game, Unpacking also stands against common video game features such as high scores, leveling up, and time trials. Attempting to speedrun this game would defeat its purpose entirely. (There are achievements to unlock but they aren’t the main point of the game; they’re fun little extras.) Carly Kocurek refers to these kinds of accomplishments as demonstrations of technomasculinity. In this construct, the only kind of gamer is young, intelligent, and white. Any mistakes a person like this makes are just forgivable whoopsies! These are the kind of people that are expected, allowed, to fail upward endlessly.

    Although Unpacking has an end state, there is no way to dominate, conquer, or defeat it. You are tying together the threads of various narratives over time. In fact, there is arguably a point where a relationship with a technomasculine boyfriend (hello, XBOX) fails because he is too insecure for the character to display her college diploma on the wall and so she has to hide it under her bed. That’s as close as you’ll get to a final boss. All of it is said without words, but through clues and cues that imply something about the life the character is unpacking.

XXX

    I wonder. Would someone who had access to the packing lists and boxes that I have used over the past 21 years also be able to trace the development that I think I’ve made in that time? Would they see my change from a wide-eyed undergrad who is eager to learn about and explore his privilege before needlessly hardening against the world in an attempt at maturity a few years later? When that shell of a second, stunted adolescence cracked, would they see a different person in 42-year-old me, or would I be just as twisted up as I was at the boundary of independent adulthood? I think I know the answer, but the truth lies somewhere in between my self-concept and the way others perceive how I’ve been able to unpack my invisible knapsack.

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Collegiate Dictionary (12th Edition) (Merriam-Webster, Inc., 2025)

    The iconic image associated with Cameron Crowe’s 1989 film Say Anything… is that of John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler. He’s holding up a boombox, a portable stereo, playing a cassette of PETER GABRIEL’s “In Your Eyes” so that Ione Skye’s Diane Court, his ex-girlfriend, can hear it through her open bedroom window. The song played during one of their intimate moments earlier in the movie, and Lloyd apparently thinks that the sounds of the “really good song” will be enough to change Diane’s mind about breaking up with him.

    As someone who first learned of the movie in high school and then modeled my personality after Lloyd Dobler’s, I can relate to this scene. I mean, I’ve never done something so demonstrative or possessive—and I wouldn’t be caught dead in a The CLASH shirt—but the way this scene feels is resonant with teenage me. (Teenage me is still a big part of me.)

    There’s a smaller moment earlier in the film that ended up being much more of a life-imitates-art inspiration for me. When Diane’s getting ready for a date, Lloyd peruses the effects in her room. One of which is “a mother dictionary.” It appears to be Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, first published in 1961. Diane tells Lloyd that she “used to have a thing of marking the words she looked up.” Lloyd then flips through pages annotated with an excess of x’s. I have done a similar thing with the dictionaries I’ve owned over the years, including one of my two copies of the Third.

    Maybe it’s unsurprising then that I was eager to get my hands on the latest edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. I’ve already got a copy of the 10th edition at work, among many other dictionaries from various publishers and years. I’ve also got the company’s app on my phone, where I pay an annual premium for ad-free access to the same words. This same information is also available for “free” online. So, why acquire a hard-copy of a dictionary in 2026? The main reason is guide words.

    Let me explain.

    A couple of jobs ago, I had a copy of the 11th edition of the Collegiate Dictionary in my cubicle. During slow times when I was waiting for pages to edit, I would flip through it to check definitions of certain words. This was company property, so I wasn’t about to mark it up. But, I did learn quite a bit about syllabication, pronunciation, and etymology in the process. One of the most memorable elements of the book was the set of guide words on page 304. Atop the page were the words cue, as in an actor’s signal, and cumber, as in to get in someone’s way or make their life harder. Do you get it? It says cue•cumber. Yes, cucumber. The vegetable! That’s hilarious! Even better, the final word in bold is cumbering, an inflected form of cumber in the headword’s definition. In my mind, this pair of guide words was an intentional error. Instead of having the header read cue•cumbering, some editor had ensured it would read cue•cumber. This was purposeful. I was sure of it! I wrote a letter explaining my thought process and complimenting the editor who had put that funny joke into the guide words. 

    I sent my letter on December 27, 2006; I received a reply on January 5, 2007.

    In the reply, Susan L. Brady explained to me that I had misinterpreted the guide word rules and that I could find more information about them in my dictionary’s front matter. Basically, using cumbering as the second guide word on page 304 would make the use of cumber as the first guide word on 305 a mistake. So, for consistency’s sake, the guide words across the top of the spread need to be in alphabetical order themselves. There went my case. The banality of style guides and alphabetical order had made my supposed discovery nothing more than a little coincidence. Still, I was excited to have received a reply, especially because it came quickly (and during a week that contained New Year’s Eve, no less!).

    You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by this point.

    A few months later, I noticed that on page 1239 of the 11th edition of the Collegiate Dictionary appeared another humorous guide word pairing. This time, it was strut•stuff. I knew immediately who needed to know this information: Susan L. Brady. Knowing that my original letter featured a naïve misunderstanding of how editors chose guide words, I decided to change things up. I reprinted my original letter and treated it as a first pass of a page I was editing. So, I changed 304 to 1239, cue to cumber, strut to stuff. I deleted the whole paragraph about the guide words being some kind of intentional joke and inserted text that explained what I had learned about guide word selection from the previous letter. Not wanting to have this letter be a mere copy of the original, I thought of the importance of the idiom “strut your stuff.” I figured why not ask for a chance to “strut my stuff” in a job interview for an editorial position? Remember, this is not a new letter. It is a marked up copy of my original message. The number of changes I made to it had turned it into a palimpsestic mess. I was sure I’d be put on some kind of DO NOT CONTACT list or maybe sent a cease and desist. This feeling only grew as the days passed. What had I done?

    Three weeks later, Susan L. Brady replied once again. I could tell the letter was different this time. It still bore the Merriam-Webster heading, complete with the slogan “From the Inkwell to the Internet.” The letter was shorter. Whereas the first letter’s body text had filled the middle third of the folded letter, this reply’s heading, body text, closing, and signature all fit within that middle third with room to spare. My heart sank to my stomach. I took a breath and read the letter.

    “Thank you for your recent letter and for sharing your latest guide word discovery. The dictionary can be so much fun, don’t you think?”

    That’s it. That’s all it was. That’s all I needed.

    There was no need to write another letter, even if I ever found a fun guide word pairing. Forget the idea of working for a major publisher as a dictionary editor. I learned an important lesson and had a deeply fulfilling experience. Someone else out there knew, just as I did, and as you may, that the dictionary can be so much fun. It still is.

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100 Rules for Living to 100: An Optimist’s Guide to a Happy Life (Dick Van Dyke, Grand Central, 2025)

    Look, I’m as surprised as you that a guy with the nickname “The Human Waterfall” has lived to be 100 years old. If you’re known for falling down, even gracefully, longevity does not seem like it would be part of your destiny. Maybe the everflowing stream that is Dick Van Dyke’s life isn’t one of those harrowing, acrophobia-inducing falls like Niagara. Maybe it’s more like a purling brook in a secluded wood with a few stair-step drops marking the water’s descent. Risky to cross, but not fatal if you slip. Van Dyke knows the importance of falling, though. The fourth chapter in the book is “Learn to fall,” and he uses it to relate the story of how he sought out Buster Keaton to learn how to tuck and roll safely. Keaton told him he’d broken most of the bones in his body, including his neck, over the years. Van Dyke doesn’t share the number of bones he’s broken, so it’s likely that Keaton’s advice proved helpful.

    So I mentioned that the fourth chapter, or rule, in the book is “learn to fall,” but I only know that because it shows up early in the text and I could count to it without losing track. You’d think a book like this one would have numbered chapters or at least a Table of Contents that would make it easy for a reader to find a particular rule. Not so fast. Chapter two is “Make your own rules.” He takes his own advice and tells us that if we are to count all of the rules in the book, we will come up short of 100. See, he’s making his own rules, even if they violate the promise made by the book’s title. For the record, there are 75 rules in the book. You will not feel shortchanged in the least.

    You also won’t be subject to relentless positive affirmations, despite the book’s subtitle. I was a little worried that “an optimist’s guide to a happy life” would be dull and trite. Like, of course a celebrity is an optimist. (I know that’s an oversimplification.) My misgivings have more to do with the fact that self-help or self-improvement books are not my cup of tea. What could I possibly learn from a beloved actor that I couldn’t learn from someone in my day-to-day life? Plenty, it seems. The advice, rules, and suggestions in the book are not for everyone, but there were more than a few times that I felt myself thinking “Wow, that’s actually interesting / helpful / clarifying.” Plus, it’s not like Van Dyke was born into fame. He tells of shoveling coal into the furnace in the basement of his house in Danville, Illinois, as a child so his baby brother and his mom could enjoy the heat. Not too many TV or movie stars had to grow up with that kind of grunt work as part of their daily routine, which means that there are many lessons Van Dyke has learned that are not dependent upon his role as a household name.

    Beyond its genuinely helpful moments, there are also many funny stories to be found in these pages. Prior to taking on the role of Rob Petrie, Van Dyke was traveling with his wife and two children in the car for a vacation. He explains how they would change their children’s diapers while in the car. Imagine the scene. Van Dyke is driving, holding up the legs of one of his kids while his wife changes the diaper. The risk alone makes this story wild. He makes it sound like this was a common occurrence. That’s not the point of the story, though. One time, while in the desert, the diaper’s stench was too much for those in the car to bear. So, thinking of the quickest possible solution, Van Dyke chucks the offending receptacle out his window. Much to his surprise, there was another car on the road even though they were in the middle of the desert. Yes, the car was trying to pass them on the left. Yes, the full diaper hit the windshield dead center at a high velocity. Yes, the other car screeched to a halt. No, Van Dyke did not. “I froze for a second and thought: Should I stop? Instead, I floorboarded it and just kept going” (p. 50). Diabolical. There’s someone out there who was on the receiving end of a soiled diaper that a pre-fame Dick Van Dyke threw out of a car window in the middle of the desert and they never knew he was the culprit. The rule here? “Don’t litter: Tips for safety and hygiene on family road trips in the 1950s.”

    Fast forward a couple decades and Van Dyke tells us of how his current wife, Arlene, helps him organize his days. He says she got him an iPad but he never uses it. She helps to coordinate his daily life, along with his assistant Jimmy. Careful readers will notice before Van Dyke points it out that Jimmy uses they/them pronouns. When Van Dyke directly addresses this aspect of Jimmy’s identity, he admits that it took a little bit of getting used to, and that “these kids keep us on their toes, don’t they?” (p. 211). That’s all. No big deal. If someone born in 1925 can understand queerness and transness that easily, then there’s no excuse for the bigotry behind getting upset over someone’s pronouns or identity. In addition to the wisdom he’s accrued with age, Van Dyke also prides himself on not using his iPad to “text or shop or browse for hours on end. Think of all the dopamine I’ve stored up!” (p. 12) So maybe there is something to be said for unplugging from devices to help keep our minds sharp and our hearts open as we age.

    There are sweet moments, too. I learned from the dust jacket that Van Dyke is an Oscar short of EGOT status, so I puzzled over the “Win an Oscar” chapter. He explains that the cast of Mary Poppins created a scrap metal award statuette for his contributions to the film. It’s not much to look at, but it means a lot coming from the cast and crew of that show. It’s dear enough to him that it is given first priority when he has to evacuate his Malibu home due to wildfires. And, as special as it is that Julie Andrews won one for her role in that film, “eighty-six actors and seventy-nine actresses have that exact same one. Mine is one of a kind” (p. 90).

    Other parts that made me laugh included the chapter where he tells the story of his appearance on The Masked Singer. The story itself is fine, but it’s in his relating of Arlene trying to convince him to do the show that I burst out laughing. She runs down the outfits that Gladys Knight and three of the Brady boys wore. And, “according to Arlene, Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols (don’t ask me who that is) wore a horned, tartan ‘jester’ outfit that could have spawned a horror franchise” (p. 259). I’m sorry but that aside is the funniest part of this book. Imagine that you are 97 years old, it is 2023 and your wife is telling you about The SEX PISTOLS in an offhand way like you should know who Johnny Rotten is. How aware was Van Dyke of punk when the first wave hit in the ‘70s? He would have already been in his late fifties. There’s no reason to think he would have been interested in contemporary music, given that he loves show tunes and jazz. The idea of him being unaware for over 40 years of a band with the name of The SEX PISTOLS and then having to process that information in the context of his wife selling him on appearing on a show where celebrities dress up in elaborate costumes to sing to a panel of judges… it’s incredible.

    The advice I’ll take to heart is to “Write it down” (189). In this chapter, Van Dyke explains how Marge Mullen, the script supervisor of The Dick Van Dyke Show, kept a notebook titled “SOS,” which stood for “some other show.” Ideas the writers had that couldn’t quite work or needed more polish or might have been too small for a full episode were stashed in this notebook for later. Their time wasn’t right, but they weren’t worth discarding either. Most people don’t write scripts for successful sitcoms, but we can still learn better habits of keeping our fleeting thoughts from escaping forever. Being better at more consistently recording those thoughts is reason enough for me to feel optimistic at this point in the year.

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