These Are the Days of Our Lives: A Thing About Innocence (in a Sense)

March 8, 2026March 16, 2026 / Rev. Joel / Leave a comment

I hung out with my cousin Nate a lot when we were kids, but mostly only during summer vacation. If I had a weekday off school before I was old enough to stay home alone, I was most likely spending the day at my grandma’s house, which was located in the tiny town five miles north of the tiny town I lived in. Both towns were very much in the middle of nowhere,¹ and both were tiny, but Grandma’s town was more of “town” in the sense that the population was mostly centrally located, even though both towns are still officially considered “unincorporated communities.” Nate lived one block away from my grandma, so when I spent my summer days there, I hung out with him (after Grandma and I ate lunch and watched Days of Our Lives), and the two of us often hung out with our cousin A.J., who lived down the hill from our grandma. When I got into my early teens, I didn’t have to go to Grandma’s house anymore, but I still went at least a couple days a week over the summer (pretty much whenever I could catch a ride from someone) because I still liked hangin out with Nate.

In the summer of 1991, he had access to a space where we could hang out and play his cheap guitar through his even cheaper practice amp without having to worry about disturbing anyone. We set up there and made a lot of noise at least one day a week that entire summer. On one of those days we recorded what I suppose one might refer to as a demo tape, if one were feeling especially generous, and had maybe never heard another demo before. Most of it is Nate on guitar and me on drums, in the sense that we turned two 44-gallon Rubbermaid trash cans upside down so we’d have something to beat on with Nate’s drumsticks. We also took turns shouting random things in our most metal voices, which really weren’t very metal at all. I played some of the guitar you can hear on the tape, in the literal sense of the word “play” as a verb, and when I was beating on the guitar, Nate was beating on the trash cans.

*A time machine to the twentieth century.*

Nate’s mom walked in the room while we were listening to our tape at his house for the first time, and Nate asked her what she thought. Without hesitation, she responded “sounds like some kinda mental illness,” which we thought was awesome, and so we decided to name our band Mental Illness. Around this same time, I was reading Metal Maniacs magazine every chance I got, and they had been writing a lot about this scary new thing called “death metal,” which was really only “scary” in the sense that I was scared of everything, and “new” in the sense that I lived in the middle of nowhere, and the news was finally just getting to me. While I was scared of it, I was also fascinated by these bands with names like Carcass and Napalm Death and Cannibal Corpse and Entombed and Pungent Stench, and I eventually talked Nate into changing our name to Vomit, which I thought sounded much cooler and more death-metal.

*I thought the title was hilarious in a way that only a fourteen-year-old dingus could.*

I suspect my inability to create a proper logo for Mental Illness also played into my desire to change the name, at least a little bit. It contains way too many letters for my novice-level art skills.

This is the only surviving evidence of my aforementioned inability to create a proper logo for Mental Illness, but I think it does a pretty good job of confirming my suspicions. It also serves as evidence of my lifelong tendency to give up when things get difficult, as mentioned previously in these pages.

The odd thing about my desire to lean into more of a death metal aesthetic is that I hadn’t even listened to any of those bands at that point, I just thought their names were cool. Aside from its existence as a concept, death metal played no part in the music we made. In fact, music played pretty much no part in the music we made. I suppose it’s possible that we made an experimental noise masterpiece, but I’m not familiar enough with the noise genre to know for sure.

*I didn’t actually get around to designing and making the cover for this tape until the following spring, which is why the copyright is 1992.*

“Ballad of Tipper Gore”was inspired by the PMRC, which was our mortal enemy back then. “Brain Damage” is our most progressive song, in the sense that it goes on quite a bit longer than the others. “Natas” is our fastest song, and was definitely inspired by our shared love for Anthrax and Nuclear Assault. “B.N.L./Nuke” is a very percussion heavy song, and was inspired by my high school. Also, not a single one of these songs could actually be considered actual songs, in the sense that they have a structure, or a beginning, or an ending, or would warrant a track number.

*I got a* lot of mileage outta that Vomit logo design.

There is actually some evidence of musical influence on the tape, if you know where to listen, but I would never blame anyone for not listening long enough to pick out those influences. We were both fans of Van Halen, and their hit “Poundcake” inspired us to run a drill over the guitar pickups a few different times. We also dipped our toes into the blues in a couple of spots, but that was really just a rip-off of Blind Melon Chitlin’, who we’d both heard on a Cheech & Chong tape that Nate swiped from his older brother Kent.²

So ridiculous.

There also exists an undercurrent of Satanism-as-shock-tactic, even though that scared me at the time. Nate was raised in (and I was raised on the edges of) a pretty backward-thinking church, but that’s a topic for another time. What’s pertinent to our demo tape is that Nate was definitely using it as an opportunity to rage against his upbringing, and I was going along for the ride so my cousin would continue to think I was cool. Today, Nate is one of a handful of cousins³ who still talks to me, so I guess it worked.

*“Natas” = “Satan” spelled backwards. See how clever we were?*

Our cousin A.J. is credited in the liner notes as “backing vocals” and “drum tech,” the latter of which makes me think maybe he’s the one who had the idea to turn the trash cans upside down. A.J. definitely brought a video camera to our jam space one time. If that tape still exists, it contains footage of my first (and last) stage dive, directly off the two-foot-high stage and onto some thin-ass carpet on top of a concrete slab. Not my smartest idea, but also not my dumbest.

The summer of ’91 ended up being our last hurrah, in a way, even though we didn’t realize it at the time. Nate is a year older than me, so when I turned fifteen a month before summer vacation the next year, he was already driving, and his dad made him get a job. Chalk it up as another victory for the crushing wheel of existence over the fleeting nature of youthful innocence.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed this lil trip down memory lane with me.

As far as I know, the town I grew up in never got cable television. If it wasn’t for satellites, those people would still only have three or four channels, and then only when the sun and the wind and the clouds are just right. ↩︎
Nate also swiped the tape we recorded our demo on from my cousin Kent, who also happened to be the person who got us into Van Halen. He likely still has no idea how influential he was to a couple of teenage dipshits. ↩︎
Out of nineteen first cousins across both sides of my family. ↩︎

“I Told Ya to Stack Em”: A Meditation on a Kindergarten Bully

March 6, 2026March 7, 2026 / Rev. Joel / Leave a comment

I shared a version of this story on my facebook page thirty-four million years ago, so if you’re reading this now and we were facebook friends back in the Eocene Epoch, you may already have read it, though I suppose it’s more of an anecdote, as most of my stories are. Anyway, I’m gonna tell it again now because regardless of whether it’s a story or an anecdote, I think it’s funny and absurd and just a little bit tragic. You can read it again if you want, I’m not the boss of you.

When I was in kindergarten, we sat in a sort of alphabetical fashion at five or six hexagon-shaped tables placed round the large, well-lit room. In theory, I shared my table space with up to five other kids my age or thereabouts. In reality, I shared my table with four other kids my age and one kid who seemed somehow older.

I was one of the youngest people in my class, so most of the other kids were actually older than me, but “Timmy” must’ve been at least thirty years old.

One fateful day, we were instructed to stack our crayons in the center of the table so the assigned helpers for that week could collect them and put them away in the cabinet before we all went to lunch.

Timmy turned to the hapless chump on his right and said “stack em.”

Eons passed, then Timmy spoke again.

“Stack em.”

The woebegone wretch let out a sigh, then placed his crayons in the center of the table and stared at the box. Timmy grew a foot taller, then turned to his left.

“Stack em.”

This hopeless boob was smaller than me, and he was already stackin em before the words even got all the way out of Timmy’s mouth. Timmy’s shoulders spread, a condor taking flight. The first kid was still staring silently at the growing stack, but everyone else followed Timmy’s glare to the next unfortunate lummox, second from his right, and also, as it happened, my immediate left.

“Stack em.”

She paused briefly, then stacked em before Timmy had to repeat himself. Next, the star-crossed doofus to my right. He hesitated a hair too long, and suddenly Timmy was eighteen years old, and his voice was a one-eyed possum climbing out of a storm drain after a flash flood.

“Stack em.”

The forlorn dolt stacked em dutifully, and I suddenly became aware that everyone was looking at me. Well, not the first kid, he was still stuck in the swamp of his very first existential crisis. Everyone else was looking at me, though. My short life flashed before my eyes. It was mostly Tom & Jerry cartoons, Peanuts comics, Kool-Aid, Count Chocula, and my favorite song.

It’s still one of my favorites.

I’d lived a pretty good life, right up until that exact moment, when a twenty-five-year-old man named Timmy was staring dead-eyed into the depths of my soul from across that table. His nose was caked with snot.

“Stack em.”

Fighting every instinct, I met his eyes and mustered my meanest glare. For the first time, I noticed a scar across the bridge of his nose.

“I said stack em.”

I began to sweat through my shirt. Timmy had grown bigger than my dad, who was the second biggest thing I had been aware of up to that point. His eyes were razors. His gritted teeth, rusty barbed wire.

“Hey bud! I said to stack em!”

I wallowed in my defeat for a single moment before admitting it to Timmy, or to my fellow travelers on the Miserable Doofus Express. I took a deep breath, I swallowed my pride (along with about three gallons of throw-up), I looked Timmy in his coal black eyes, and I stacked em with enough force to level the maple tree in our front yard, which was the biggest thing I was aware of up to that point.

Timmy was now ten feet tall. He triumphantly placed his crayons on top of the stack and croaked “I told ya to stack em,” and then he died of old age.

I made up that last part, but it’s a peculiar fact that forty-four years later, my sole memory of Timmy is “stack em.” I’m not sure how that’s possible, but it seems he was only in my class for one day, which happened to also be picture day, as he appears in my kindergarten yearbook. Thing is, I scribbled his picture out pretty bad with a red magic marker, so I have to assume that he was in my life for more than the three minutes it took him to establish stacking dominance over a gang of luckless goobers.

When I shared this story on facebook, I decided to see if I could find Timmy, and brothers and sisters, I’m here to tell you that I found Timmy. Suffice to say that while he may have been victorious when it came to stackin crayons, all signs indicate that I ended up above Timmy on the big stack that we call life, so suck it, Timmy.

Thanks for reading. Tell a friend, why don’tcha?

Even the Losers Get Lucky Sometimes

May 3, 2025August 23, 2025 / Rev. Joel / Leave a comment

You know what I’d really like to sit in right now? My homeboy Jim’s old green-and-beige plaid swivel rocking chair, that’s what. That was a perfect chair. I don’t know where he got it from, but it was in his bedroom when we were kids (after his older brother moved out, and he took over the bigger room), and to this day it was the most comfortable chair I ever sat in. At some point he no longer had room for it, so he lent it to me, and I had it in my possession for approximately 4 years. Four of the most comfortable-sittin years of my life.

I gave it back to Jim before I moved to Texas, and I’ve missed it ever since. That chair would make our recently-cleaned study/vidja game room the bee’s knees. Right now it’s the cat’s pajamas. If it had that chair and a sweet rug to tie the room together? Duck’s sunglasses. I’m sure I could find a similar chair, but it wouldn’t be as comfortable. Nothing could ever be as comfortable as that chair. And look, I know nostalgia is coloring my opinion of the chair, but I also know comfort (and sitting), and I’ve sincerely never had a more comfortable sitting experience than in that chair. That includes our dope purple velour mid-century-style armchair from Joybird, which is probably the second most comfortable chair I’ve ever sat in.

I’ve got some great memories with Jim’s old chair. I watched Twin Peaks for the first time while sittin in that chair. I read On the Road for the first time while sittin in that chair. I fell in love with The Beatles while sittin in that chair. I completed Super Mario World with a 96* for the first (and so far only) time while sittin in that chair. Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol saved my life one night while I sat in that chair.

One time I got real stoned, ordered a pizza, and later fell asleep watchin Grosse Point Blank while sittin in that chair. When I woke up the next morning, I picked the pizza box up off the floor next to me and ate the rest of the pizza in the dark and silence while sittin in that chair. I suppose I wouldn’t call that a “great” memory, as such, but it’s a vivid one, to be sure. That was a weird time in my life. I plan on writing about my wilderness years at some point, but I wouldn’t get too pumped for it just yet, or maybe at all.

I texted Jim and told him I was thinkin about the chair. He responded “didn’t I give that to you?” followed by “WTH happened to that?” I guess the chair didn’t leave the same impression on Jim’s brain (his butt either, apparently). He’s always had a bad memory, though, and I’ve always been a slut for nostalgia, so it’s not terribly surprising that things turned out this way. Anyway, I hope the chair is up in heaven, being sat in by Harry Dean Stanton. He deserves a good sit.

Charles Montgomery Burns mediates on the pleasures of sitting. — *You said it, ya weirdo.*

Last time, I talked about high school reunions, and earlier today, I started reading through my unfinished high school reminiscence project. A quick correction: in my previous post, I indicated that the working title of said project was “Unfinished High School Reminiscence Project”, and when I found the file today, I was reminded that at some point I changed the working title to High School, or “My Obstacle“. Clockwise Circle Pit regrets the error.

As in: GET THE FUCK DOWN OFF OF MY OBSTACLE!

A lot of it is way outdated, on account of I started writing it during the first summer of Li’l Bush’s second term, and plenty of it is embarrassing, on account of I started writing it 20 fucking years ago. Some of it is less embarrassing, though, and today I’m gonna share one of those less embarrassing parts. This was on my mind when I was writing my high school reunion thing, and when I realized it also mentioned Jim, from up yonder, I figured I was fated to share it here. It must be your lucky day. I corrected some grammar and gave it a general tidying up, because I’m a better writer now than I was when I was 28 years old. Here it is.

Average Joe(l)

My identity in high school was pretty low key. I was the nice guy that a decent cross-section of people knew, and I made small talk with a wide variety of people and cliques, but I had a pretty small core of actual friends. The core changed and morphed throughout my high school career, but it always included Jim, as it always has since that fateful day of kindergarten registration, when I stood behind my mom, clutching her leg in horror as Jim peeked around the wall of his parents’ living room, each of us too shy to speak a word to the other.

As the days, months, and years ticked by, Jim and I both changed, and we had our ups and downs (as true friends do), but we never lost sight of what was the foundation of our friendship – that we could always rely on each other, no matter what. Now, our lives have taken drastically different directions, but I know I can still call Jim, and we can still hold a conversation as if we haven’t been apart.

Perhaps nothing illustrates my social standing circa 1995 better than the final issue of our sub-mediocre school newspaper, The BNL Star. On an otherwise regular spring morning, just as first period was beginning, two intrepid reporters for the Star came into my classroom and spoke to the teacher. The teacher told me I needed to go with them, causing everyone in the room to turn and look at me, an event which haunts me to this day. On the way down the hall, they told me I’d won a senior survey category.

Not “Best Looking” or “Most Popular” or anything like that. What I won was “Most Average Person”, a category I don’t recall even noticing when I filled out my survey, though to be fair, I only voted for “Best Sense of Humor (Girl)” (my friend Liz) and “Best Sense of Humor (Boy)” (me). We arrived at my locker, and I stood sweating in my Jimmy Page & Robert Plant 1995 tour shirt while an ace photographer from the Star took my picture. A week or so later, I turned to the senior survey and located my picture way down in the bottom-right corner of page 7, way past the “Most Talkative” and total bullshit “Best Sense of Humor” categories, down below “Favorite Movie” (Forest (sic) Gump) and “Favorite Car” (Mustang), along with a caption: “‘Mr. Average Nice Guy’ – Joel Hearth”. How nice.

Just to the left of that was the official, less pleasant, designation, “Most Average Person”. The name beneath that illustrious title? My cousin Billy, with whom I share no physical resemblance. Turns out I was so average, they didn’t even know which Hearth I was.

That concludes the old part of this post. Here’s proof of concept.

*I had to go back to class after this picture was taken. Everyone looked at me again and I hated it.*

For the record, I would never say “rock the house”. Can you even imagine? This concludes the new part of this post. I hope you enjoyed both. Thanks for reading.

Thanks, You Too

March 7, 2024August 17, 2025 / Rev. Joel / 2 Comments

I started writing this thing on November 24 of last year. I’m gonna be completely honest here and say that I’m most likely never gonna get around to writing about the rest of Louder Than Life 2023. Sorry if you were looking forward to that for whatever reason. Speaking of Louder Than Life, this year’s lineup has some real duds, but overall, it’s pretty amazing, and I’ll probably write about something at least adjacent to LTL2024 sometime before we actually attend the festival, but for now, I’m doing something else. I don’t really understand it, either.

*I’m only super stoked on one headliner, but that undercard is* stacked.

Highlights of Days 3 and 4 last year include Run the Jewels, Turnstile, Green Day (those dudes know how to close out a motherfucking festival!), The Bronx, Jehnny Beth, and the delightful couple from Australia who chatted us up before that Pantera thing. That Pantera thing sounded good, by the way, and it was cool to hear those songs live again, as they were part of the soundtrack to my angry youth, but we didn’t stay for the whole thing. Sheila said Viagra Boys were great, and I’m really bummed I missed them, but they were overlapping with both Run the Jewels and Turnstile, and I couldn’t not see all that. They were both transcendent, by the way. Another highlight was talking to a younger dude who traveled from New Zealand just to see Turnstile. He got to experience them from the center of the rail, and I was very happy for him.

Anyhoo, I deleted the part where I mentioned how I don’t write enough, and the part where said I was still gonna write about the last two days of LTL2023, and the part where I promised I would do so before the 2024 lineup dropped, and I updated the first part, and lightly edited the whole thing for clarity, spelling, and grammatical errors. Not that any of it matters.

__________________________________________

My friend Chris and I made a book! He drew comics out of three of my dumb/mostly true/pretty funny stories based on my childhood, and he made them so much funnier. It’s called Speaking of…, and it’s a Certified Hoot.* 50 hardcover copies of were made for No Dice Books, and they’re beautiful, if I do say so myself. They’re also sold out. This is one of the things I had to update. If I’d gotten this post up in a timely fashion, you probably could’ve snagged one. Apologies for my delinquency. I was really unhappy at my job at the time, and I just didn’t feel like doing a final edit.

We had a softcover second edition printed too, and at it’s also beautiful, and with only 50 copies in existence, it’s technically just as rare. Its available over at the website, and I also have a few copies available for purchase directly from me. They cost 10 American smackers, plus an extra 5 bones for shipping (unless you buy one directly from me – duh).

If you bought a copy of Speaking of…, THANK YOU! If you’ve read it and enjoyed it, you should 100% check out Chris’ other stuff. It’s all so fucking good. Witch Shit! is on its own plane. It’s so goddamn funny and silly, and I think about it all the time.

*One of my favorite things in the whole world.*

The nostalgia that has accompanied the publication of Speaking of… has got me thinking about my childhood lately – like more than usual, even. My childhood seems “normal” to me, but what can that really mean? Alls I really know is it’s the only childhood I had, and it’s been on my mind lately. There was an episode of Bob’s Burgers a couple of months ago about bullying, and it’s one of those very sweet episodes of Bob’s Burgers that they do so very well. The result of all this is that I was thinking about bullying, and how fucked up bullying is, and then I realized that I was relatively lucky in that I wasn’t really bullied much as a kid. There were a few exceptions, though…

The first kid that tried to give me the business was staying at his dad’s house across the road for a few days over the summer. One day we were talking in the front yard, and he threw grass in my hair. I’d just had my bath and gotten dressed to go to kindergarten registration, and I did not appreciate his turd-like behavior. I related this information to him, and asked him to stop. He advised me that he intended to continue with the grass-in-the-hair bullshit, and punctuated this statement with more grass in the hair. I asked him again, nicely, to cease with his fool-acting. He once again did the thing with the grass. I indicated one final time, in a more forceful manner, that I would tolerate no more of his nonsense.

Unfortunately (for him), he’d gone too far to turn back now. He picked one more handful of grass and threw it at me, and I completely snapped. I started yelling and slapping and kicking at him, and he tried to fight back, but aspiring bully or no, he was only six years old, so he was not equipped to understand what was happening to him, and he didn’t let it go on for long before he ran back across the road crying. He told me he was gonna tell his dad, and I think I told him to shut up, then my mom made me come back inside. I honestly don’t recall ever seeing that kid again after that summer. I’m not saying he left town because he was scared of me or anything, but if one of my neighbors freaked out on me the way I freaked out on him, I’d do whatever it took to make sure they didn’t see me again. He definitely had no idea how scared I was about the whole thing.

Once I started kindergarten, there was a kid at my table who insisted on having his box of crayons on top of the stack, and he seemed like he might’ve been up to 23 years old, so I let that one go. I have no memories of him after that, so I have to assume it was an isolated incident, but we never came to blows, and I’m fine with that. I’m a lover, not a fighter.

My third experience with an aspiring bully was this kid who lived next door to us for a while when I was in second grade. He had an older sister, and I’m not sure what his parents did for a living, but I have a vague memory of them moving in, and a very distinct memory of the dad pulling in the driveway in his new Chevette, and grinning at me with a comically large overbite as he asked me “does the neighbors like it?” in the most southern Kentucky accent I can imagine (which happens to be one of my favorite accents, by the way). I do remember that the kid was a bit of shithead, and also that I sometimes hung out with him on account of his age and proximity, and because he had this really cool book about The Empire Strikes Back that had some exclusive behind-the-scenes photos. I’m not made of stone.

Basically, he was just kind of a turd to me most of the time in general, and then one day he kept trying to run me off the road while we were riding bikes. I complained about that during supper, and my dad quickly told me I should whip his ass. My mom was not on board with that, but Dad insisted that if I didn’t make a stand now, I’d be dealing with so much worse later. With regards to my aforementioned “lover not a fighter”-ness, my friend Jeff and I decided the element of surprise would favor me, so Jeff called him over to some other dude’s house around the corner and told him I wanted to talk to him.

We started to walk away toward the house, and I grabbed him, made one wild punch that I’m pretty sure didn’t land (I figure I’d remember if it did), then I freaked out and started yelling and slapping and kicking at him until he ran crying toward the house. The only visible physical injury he sustained was a cut next to his eye from running into the tailgate of the truck in the driveway while he was crying. I have no memories of him after that, although I’m positive that they didn’t move away that night.

Apparently there’s something to be said for losing your shit and yelling and slapping and kicking at someone who is bullying you. It’s obviously not gonna work on everyone, and it’ll likely get you severely injured (or worse) if you try it on the wrong person, but I have to imagine it would end a lot of dumb, avoidable fights early. I went 2-0 with it, and retired a champion. And my overall bully average was .666, which, in addition to being metal as fuck, would be an impressive average for any baseball player. Maybe I should make a series of training videos teaching my patented technique. I’ll call it Freakout!: How to Prevent Fights by Making Your Agressor Think You’re Off Your Nut. Order in the next hour and get a free bonus video, Thanks, You Too: How to Make Any Conversation Awkward in 15 Seconds or Less.

That’s all I got for now. Thanks for reading. And seriously, if you haven’t ordered a copy of Speaking of…, or any of Chris’s other stuff, do that now.

* Hoot certification by the Clockwise Circle Pit Hoot Certification Institute of America, est. 2019.