Who Is Jon Reed?
And What’s the Deal with this Web Site?

In a hurry? Read the short bio of Jon Reed instead.

JR update, May 4, 2003: It's now been almost two years since this site went up. Many circumstances have changed. Rachel Meyers, who is still unflappable and is still, and will always be, the person who is most responsible for pushing me back in the right creative direction and back towards the person I always wanted to be, is no longer my girlfriend. She's still the webmaster around here, though, and you'll see her popping in from time to time to double-check my half-baked HTML and offer her thoughts on my latest work as well as her own. We wish her well, and this site will always be a testament to her spirited determination to snatch the joys of living from the jaws of workaday life. As for the piece below, reading through it two years later, there's very little I'd want to change now. This piece raised the bar in my life back to where it needed to be. With some good fortune, some gritty effort, and the support of my readers and friends, hopefully I can live up to the potential Rachel saw when she built this site for me.

Sometimes you can be right in the middle of living your life and not even know you are lost. That is how it was for me, until my unflappable girlfriend Rachel Meyers designed this web site with my best writing on it and showed it to me for the first time.

As I read through the work collected here, I get a little chill and feel a sudden reason to live, drawing my best self back out from wherever it was hiding. Although I am saddened to see that much of the writing on this web site is at least five years old, I also see some recent writing in the mix, and, more importantly, I sense that much more of Jon Reed is now on the way, somehow being conjured up by the collective mass of the best writing I’ve done up until this point all gathered in one place for the first time.

I don’t know if you’ll like the writing on this site, or if you’ll feel any of the chill that I did as I re-read a few of my best attempts at defying the mediocrity of workaday life. You’ll probably just think I’m full of shit and wonder, like so many have, how I got to be this way in the first place. But that is part of the thrill of this exhibit - I’m now out there, in the most authentic way I have been able to pull off to date, and now my work can engage other people, for better and for worse. And I can’t help but think that there’s at least a few other people out there who think that showing commercials in movie theaters during the previews is a sign of the apocalypse.

I am always my own critic first, and most of my old stuff hasn’t made the cut for this site. The writing that has always captured my imagination has the power of truth. I think we can sense when words are written by someone with fire in their hearts and a refusal to sell out. We can tell when people are too caught up in their own self-indulgence, and we can sense when people are compromising their work in order to meet the needs of marketing departments. I’ll be the first to admit that most of the writing I’ve done in the past does not survive this kind of scrutiny. The rare pieces that really had some firepower behind them made the cut, and that is what you see before you on this web site.

Reading through this material, some of you will be amazed that I have actually held down real jobs - you might be astonished to learn that I have a corporate identity at all. In truth, I really have learned how to pass myself off as a business person, at least some of the time, although that has gotten me into as much trouble as it has helped me over the years. It is only recently that I have radically changed the org chart and required Jon the business person to report directly to Jon Reed, the psychotic reporter from the lunatic fringe. I wonder if that’s going to be good for business? Well, at least it begins to address an obvious question: where has the “Jon Reed” we see on these pages been all these years?

I can try to give you some answers, but they may not satisfy you any more than they do me. You could call it a detour, or you could call it facing the material world head on. You could call it a naïve attempt to get rich, or you could call it a savvy but ultimately futile attempt to ride the dotcom wave into the promised land. You could certainly call it getting fucked over by people who were never supposed to leave your side as you conquered the business world together.

What I wanted to do was to buy my way to creative freedom by becoming financially independent. The goal was noble but the timeframe was unforgiving. It is too early to say that I failed, but it is fair to say that I was on the wrong track, deferring too much gratification and muzzling my true passions in the service of the wrong people and the wrong goals. Most of these lessons have been brought to light by the aforementioned Rachel, who has stubbornly and confidently brought me around to seeing that I must make a lot more happen NOW, because there’s just too much living out there to miss out on. I’m still convinced that financial freedom, as opposed to a life of ever-increasing consumer debt and consumption, is a big piece of the puzzle, but as this web site shows, there is a way to speak the FUCKING TRUTH even when I don’t have a dime in my wallet. And I’m still convinced that despite the vast distance between me and the idealistic young college graduate of January 1991 (you know, the one who was convinced he was going to go out and save the world, or at least make a difference in people’s lives), that there’s still a chance I will pull it off. Or to put it another way, that perhaps in the passionate and prolonged struggle to free myself and write the truth, someone else out there will also be affected. If not, I guess I’ll just thrash around regardless, since that appears to be my nature anyway.

But maybe the best way to explain what happened to the real Jon Reed is by quoting from a letter I wrote back when I was making money but not really solving any of these problems:

“I have been thinking a lot about the battles with the material world I am engaged in - liking the success, but missing the emptiness that I fear and need for creative expression. The contradictions of materialism versus creativity, financial success versus the rebel yell of the outsider, live on within me. Looking towards the outside world, sour grapes and the fear of poverty haunt me. On the inside, success and material gains threaten to seduce me, or just enact a slow death through striving. I do wonder if I could have somehow avoided this whole skirmish, but can you really avoid it? Perhaps the key is to keep some kind of balance, to keep writing. If I keep writing, maybe I can hold onto that spark.”

Well, I did keep writing, but what I didn’t realize is this: it’s not how much you write, but why you write. It’s not the end result, but the spirit of the act. I have written thousands of pages of business-caliber prose that will someday pile higher than the highest tombstone you could erect in my honor, and in the end, all that proof that I have “kept writing” will not really matter at all.

But I think the work on this site matters. Some of these pieces now seem flawed to me; many of them I could write much better now than I did then. Sometimes I was too cruel and did not give seriously talented people a fair shake. I will address some of my worst grievances through occasional introductory comments, and I see that Rachel has already challenged my bitter excesses on one of the old record reviews, and that is as it should be. But there are a few pieces on this site that I have an altogether different reaction to. It feels like a kind of deep respect, almost a sense of awe that something so right could force its way out of me despite the confusion or even despair I was feeling when I originally wrote it. Of course, I’m not going to say which pieces still have that power over me, because that would spoil your chance to figure that out for yourself.

But more than anything, I dream that somewhere on this site, in at least one place, you will get a bit of that chill yourself, and feel something resonate inside you. And when you do, if you send me an email and tell me all about it, that will be the happiest day of my life. Because then I’ll know for sure: Jon Reed is BACK!