It was almost midnight a week ago. I was having trouble sleeping--or rather, I wasn't tired and couldn't sleep. So I'd decided to dive into a new book. A few months back I'd picked up a bunch of pop culture books.

The tenth anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death touched off a bit of nostalgia for me, hearkening back to the mid-90s. The time in my life when I was at the epicenter of pop culture politics. It was the last time the popular culture of the world was pointing straight at me. I was one of those thrift shop junkie slacker miscreants who couldn't get a good job to save his life. I can't say it was always the best of times, but I did have a lot of fun back then.

A writer I've been reading in Spin for the last few years is Chuck Klosterman. I can't say I always agree with him, but I do find his writing style engaging and agree with his theories frequently. When I got my big stash of pop culture books, I bought Chuck's two collections: Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and Fargo Rock City. The first is the most recent--a collection of articles about different aspects of pop culture. TV, music, movies, commercials and other types of mass consumed information. I read that one quickly and even handed out one of the articles to people at work. Then I started Songbook by Nick Hornby. When I finished Songbook (about a week ago), I decided to dive into Fargo Rock City.

As I said before, it was close to midnight. Fargo Rock City is about glam rock or metal or hair rock or cock rock. It's about the music I listened to when I was in high school and the first couple years of college. Unsurprisingly, I was immediately engaged with the book. I was starting to get a little drowsy and almost stopped reading for the night, but decided to push on a little bit more. In the very next paragraph I read after making the very conscious decision not to turn off the light, I came across something that woke me up again:

"...it's damn near impossible for me to make a comprehensive list of every '80s glam band that ever existed, because I've come to realize that metallurgy isn't an exact science. Nonetheless, zine editor Matt Worley did a pretty decent job in a 1995 issue of his publication Lies (which may or may not have taken its name from the 1988 Guns N' Roses EP). Here's his hit list..."

The passage goes on to reprint a list of bands I made up as a teaser in issue #4 for what would become our "glam rock issue" (Lies #5). It's a long list. After the list he adds, "Well, Mr. Worley obviously forgot Helix."

I have to say that this kind of sent me into a bit of confusion--although not about why I forgot Helix (there's a good reason for that). How is it I'm reading a book in the middle of the night which, for no good reason I could tell at the time, mentions MY NAME? Did I get signed up for some kind of twisted reality TV show? Are there cameras on me right now? Why didn't anyone tell me? You said Darth Vader killed my father--why did you lie to me Obi Wan!??!

The first thing I was able to actually do (after reading, re-reading, etc.) was to go wake up my roommate by saying, "I was reading this book, and it talks about me!" It took me at least an hour and a half to get to sleep after this. My brain was, obviously, spinning.

The next day at work, I shared the strange news with people at work. They were, appropriately I guess, impressed. Or at least amused. It wasn't until the next day when the answer to my big question ("How did this happen?") was answered. And this is where, well, an apology is in order.

Chuck Klosterman wrote for Lies magazine back in 1995. He'd come across issue #4 and sent us an article about glam rock for inclusion in issue #5. Obviously he'd gone back and done research for the book, and re-reading his own article had provided Chuck many insights, as many of his lines were reused in his book. As far as I can tell, the glam rock article is the only one he wrote for us. I can't remember if I talked to him on the phone or had e-mail back and forths or what.

In the acknowledgment section of Fargo Rock City, he says if he's had at least two conversations with someone in his lifetime, that person is in the book. It's very possible we had conversations or some kind of correspondence. However, this did not cause me to remember his name when I started seeing it in print elsewhere--beginning in Spin a few years back.

I have some excuses. One is that hundreds of people wrote, illustrated and did other things for Lies Magazine in the three and a half years of its existence. I tend to remember the people who did things for a series of issues--I read and typed their names in more. Another is, well it's kind of like what people said about Woodstock. If you remember being at Woodstock, then you weren't actually there. I can say the same thing about a lot of stuff in the mid-90s.

That being said, I feel bad I didn't realize Chuck was a Lies alumnus. The magazine is the biggest and strangest accomplishment of my post-collegiate life, and so its legacy is very important to me. I hope Chuck doesn't mind--he's got a publishing deal in spite of the erasure of memory on my part.

Matt Worley does want to express the sentiment of a great Morphine song to Chuck (if he's out there, if he's listening): "You did it all in spite of me."