Splotchy: What is your blog?

Johnny Yen: Here Comes Johnny Yen Again. It’s the opening line to Iggy Pop’s great song “Lust For Life.” It’s an homage to my youthful exuberance. I was quite the bon vivant. I’m a much calmer guy these days, LOL! And happier.

S: When and why did you start blogging?

JY: The beginnings of my blog go back to two things. 

One was an article I had read in the New York Times a few years after the 9/11 attacks. It was about a South Dakota couple, farmers, whose daughter was killed in the attacks that day— she worked in one of the Twin Towers. The daughter’s belongings from her New York City apartment were returned to the couple. This included the daughter’s laptop. The couple weren’t very savvy with computers, but a friend helped them open it after they’d had it for about a year. They discovered that she had kept a list of life goals. They were fascinating, ranging from the mundane to the magnificent. Things like “gossip less,” to “climb K-2,” etc. Shortly after reading the article, I opened a computer file and started my own list. Mine had things like “Make sure I can pay for college for (my son),” and “Teach (my daughter) to ride a bike.” “Journal more often,” “Buy more art.” “Plan for retirement.” And “Start a blog.” I still have the list, and still update it, adding to it occasionally and marking off things I’ve accomplished.

I had to change some of them. #1, which was to pay for college for my son, became “Pay for college for both of my kids.” Which I did. In fact, the list had its intended effect— it focused my life. 

The second thing that got me to start my blog, besides that it was on my list of life goals, was the horrific murder in the summer of 2006 of my friend Mark Evans, who had the nickname “Atwood,” from the Iliinois town near where he grew up in, and hung out in. Mark was one of the most unique people I ever met. His family were, like the family of the woman with the list that inspired mine, farmers. He’d grown up sensitive, weird and artistic in Central Illinois, a place where jocks and cheerleaders were king. He was bullied mercilessly, something I could relate to— my family had moved from a diverse part of Chicago to a bland non-diverse suburb, and it was not fun. I was bullied a lot. At Eastern Illinois University, he and I kept running into one another at parties and bars, and had great conversations, and became lifelong friends. We became part of a bigger crowd. We’d found our tribe.

After college, I moved back to the north side of Chicago, where I’d mostly grown up. He moved there too, and we roomed together with another EIU classmate for a year. Over time, when I became a parent, we spent less time together, though he still lived near me in Chicago. 

His brutal murder was part of the worst week of my life, in June, 2006. I was being laid off of a teaching job I thought I’d work until I retired— I’d had a two year battle with education’s version of Nurse Ratchet, trying to jump through the hoops she put up. The same week, my father was diagnosed with cancer, which they thought might be pancreatic cancer. Even before I was a nurse, I knew that was nearly always fatal. When I got an email (our mutual friend didn’t have my current number) that Mark had been found shot to death on his own front lawn, I was staggered. When losing your job is only the third worst thing to happen in a week, it’s bad.

The blog helped me process my grief, and gave me a community of cool and interesting people with varied backgrounds and interests. As I started being able to manage my grief, and the perp was caught and sent away for 75 years without parole, and my dad recovered from his cancer (he lived another 15 years) and I finally got a plan, nursing school, I continued blogging not so much to process loss, but because it became fun. 

S: Did you stop blogging?

JY: No— I still post once in a blue moon.

S: Was there anything in particular which slowed down your blogging?

JY: When I finished nursing school— see “pay for college for my children”— I got a job that was incredibly stressful, but also gave me essentially unlimited overtime. It was great to be able to pretty much just pay my kids’ tuition, and have them come out with very little debt. But it entailed working 50-60 hour weeks, and some 70 hour weeks. I didn’t have the energy to blog. And of course, Facebook came along, and most of the old blogging crowd went over to it. 

I still feel a part of that community of bloggers— I still look forward to the posts from those people— among them, Vikki, Chris, Becky, Dale, Beth, Aaron, Polly, Kristi, Sharon, Lulu, Barbara, Margaret, Bubs, and of course our prodigal son, Grant Miller. Oh, and that Splotchy guy! There must be about 25 from the old group that transitioned over to social media. I deleted one of them because they had a habit of attacking people on my blog, and another because he was a creep. Most are either not blogging, or not blogging very regularly, but I still feel a connection because they were there when I needed them, restoring my faith in humanity, with their intelligence and compassion. I badly needed to see that after the events of June, 2006. The medium may have changed, but I still love that I keep in touch with them, still see their kindness and wisdom.

I may start blogging again. I thought I would get a break when I left my old overtime-heavy job that had paid for college for my kids and helped my wife and I buy a house. And of course, being a nurse in a worldwide pandemic threw a wrench in that for nearly four years. I’m starting a new job in a week, and I’m hoping it’s less stressful than the ones I’ve been working the last 12 years. 

I also might start blogging about nursing. I feel like Roy Batty, Rutger Hauer’s character in “Blade Runner.” “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…” In all the years of my life before I was a nurse, I’d seen only a few dead people i— one in the ER of a hospital, and the rest at open casket funerals. Since becoming a nurse, I’d seen several dozen people die right in front of me. A handful of those were people who I was giving a dialysis treatment to, and I had to calmly run a code while a crash team was resuscitating or trying to resuscitate someone. I gave CPR and shocked someone with an AED for the first time at work last year. I’ve seen great and awful things, and had remarkable conversations with patients and family members. If I can do it while respecting the privacy and dignity of the patients I’ve handled, I might do it. 

S: How do you feel about social media? Does it give you the same feelings as blogging? Why or why not?

JY: I’ve got mixed feelings about social media. I love the fact that a bunch of lovely people I’ve met in various parts of my life, or bloggers I’ve never met, but adore, are still part of my life. Old friends who live in other parts of the country are still part of my daily life. On the other hand, social media has helped greatly increase “confirmation bias” in people. Blatant and sometimes monstrous lies have been spread on social media. My late friend Mark originally sold me on going onto the internet because he thought it would be a wonderful marketplace of ideas. It’s a marketplace of ideas, all right. But some of those ideas are terrible. But I don’t see social media, good or bad, disappearing any time soon.

S: How do you feel about the state of the Internet in general?  This is a very broad question, so feel free how to answer as you see fit.

JY: I see good and bad. I was telling a friend this weekend a story that involved running into the governor of Illinois, who was an alum of my college, in a used bookstore around 1993. The funny part was that I was excited about finding a book I’d been looking for for years (a bio of Albert Camus), and nearly didn’t notice that the governor was standing next to me (my first clue was that there were three guys with guns and walkie-talkies also near me). These days, it might not have happened. I’d just get on the internet and go to Alibris or ABEBooks and find the book (I just looked— it took a few clicks, and the book is $4.52, LOL). Going through bins of books and records, and finding random things is something that was great, and might lead to finding something unexpected. My friend Michael Roper, who owns the Hopleaf tavern in Chicago with his wife Louise, was telling me a while back that younger people are staying in in droves. They don’t come out to bars and have conversations with random people. They’re home on the internet playing games or whatever. The internet has increased access to information, but it’s taken away some wonderful randomness in life. 

P.S. The picture. It was taken in Shanghai, China in 2002. I was there with an old friend, and it amused me that Ronald McDonald— and capitalism— had beaten me to China. It was the picture I used on the dating app I met Kim through. It obviously worked. 

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Thanks so much for this interview, JY! It was nice hearing your thoughts, about everything.