The Best Year of My Life: An Epic Adventure In 12 Parts: July

For the final 12 days of the year, I thought I'd look back at my 2012 and determine why it was the best year of my life. Every month brought new adventures, achievements, bits of awesome that worked to make my world a happier, more fulfilling, more exciting place. Come along with me, won't you?

July

For a birthday month I insisted would be low-key, a whole bunch actually happened in July.

After weeks of brainstorming and restructuring, Cuddy and I were all set to launch the re-envisioning of A Night of Oral Tradition, and I can take credit for the name: we were going to call it The Scoop, and position it as the premiere storytelling night in Cambridge. (I was unaware that there was an already-established storytelling night in Cambridge, and it was only on once a month. At exactly the same time as our show. These repercussions would become apparent much later.)

The night before my birthday, I slammed into the Rosebud with all my friends and I sang “Thunder Road” on stage. People bought me drinks and snacks. It was nothing short of bliss.

On July 18th, 2012, I turned thirty-seven. I didn’t feel it. Friends came over to my house and we had a small birthday party with cake. My friend Neil got me a shaving kit, fulfilling one of my New Years’ resolutions. After the party, me and Marty and Ian headed out to the very first presentation of The Scoop. I got onstage and told my story about chasing Bruce Springsteen across the Midwest with my uncle Warren and his Christian friend Kevin. It was well-received by the seven people there.

Speaking of music: the new Gaslight Anthem album, Handwritten, was released, and I immediately fell in love with it. Maybe not as good as American Slang, but few albums could be. Like almost everyone else, I've been guilty of growing more song-oriented, rather than album-oriented. So it's a good reminder, when someone like Bruce Springsteen or Drive-By Truckers or a relatively new obsession like Gaslight Anthem comes out with something new, I listen to the whole thing front to back and live inside their whole concept for awhile. Plus, they rock super hard, and that's awesome for the gym.

I wrote one review for FEARnet – on the second, more disturbing section of “In the Tall Grass” – and wrote two poems: “Duke’s Temper,” and “Imbalance.” In bigger writing news, I finished my rewrite of I’m On Fire on July 25th and almost immediately cried. It had a more nihilistic finish, stronger characters, better backstories. It had better writing than it had had before. Because I’m learning more about the aftercare of novels, I sent it along to my friend John Perich to beta-read, and I waited.

Near the end of the month, my long-term tattoo artist, Kelly, was back in town to ink his best customers for a couple weeks. I’d written to him earlier in the month and said, “Tom Servo?” He said, “YES.” Before there was Buffy night, before there was Angel night, before there was Desperate Housewives night, my friends and I would all gather round and watch MST3K. More recently, I’d been getting together with comedy people and watching old episodes and remembering how awesome they were, and how much fun could still be mined from them. Not to mention the fact that the show I was producing this month at Sketchhaus was an MST3K-type show called Director’s Commentary. Through enormous, crushing pain, I got myself a Tom Servo tattoo, and Kelly commented that I was looking jacked.

Those twice-a-day visits to the gym actually were paying off, something my oldest buddy Jim noticed when we went out to do a photoshoot out by the Port of Boston. Jim’s something of an old camera nut, so he wanted to not only wanted to shoot me, he wanted to try out his vintage cameras and hard-to-find film. The result was a series of pictures of me that were probably the best I’d ever taken, most in delightful black and white.

As it turned out, the rumors were true. Rocky Horror in Harvard Square was being shut down after twenty-eight years. All that time spent in my late twenties and early thirties going to the show every single week, poof, vanished. I wrote a whole blog post about how much Rocky means to me, but suffice it to say that it was a major, major part of my world for a long time, and I’d discovered (in Chelsea, of all places) that I never had to let it go, not entirely. The theater announced that they would have two farewell shows for the Harvard location, and sold out both nights. Weirdly, it was my friend Vickie – who’d never come to the show with me before – who decided to join me for both shows. On that last night, I swapped clothes with a chubby Rocky virgin on stage (I was wearing my I Heart Chubby Bearded Dudes shirt, so it wasn’t all that surprising). Vickie remembered some of the callback lines. And at the end of the night, they turned up the house lights and blasted “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and I blew out my voice singing along.

One of the most important things I learned in 2012 was that the stuff you love never really disappears. It just waits. And it eventually comes back.

Books Read: In One Person, by John Irving; The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane; The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams; and The Buffalo Hunter, Peter Straub