Tom Keiser: Lust For Glory

I guess when it comes to questions, quality follows quantity.  There are no bad questions, just ones I’m too lazy or perplexed to answer.

SO KEEP ‘EM COMING FOLKS!!!

I didn’t really start reading for pleasure until the end of my first year in college.  My first love was the essay, especially E. B. White, Joan Didion (The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem were gateway drugs to me), and George Orwell.  As for fiction, Kurt Vonnegut was an early favorite; I like authors who are often holed into genres, like Chester Himes and Charles Willeford.  I also have a thing for post-apocalyptic fiction; less Road Warrior stuff than how society breaks down in the face of annihilation.  When it comes to classic and international authors, I like Sinclair Lewis, Albert Camus, Karel Capek, Mikhail Bulgakov, stuff like that.

This thing keeps screwing up so I’ll keep it short.  I like a lot of the stuff he’s done up to and including Crimes and Misdemeanors.  I especially like his “early funny ones” (Bananas, Take The Money And Run, etc.), and I believe Zelig is better than Forrest Gump.

I really don’t know.  I’m not sure exactly how much you or many other of my followers know about me.  The main things are that I’m 26, and live in New Jersey.  I’m single and gay, and graduated from college last year.  I love to write, and am at my happiest when I feel like a writer, if that is understandable.  I have been depressed for much of my life, but in the past six months I have vastly improved, and I am at a great place in my life.  I have written (and will continue to write) for The Awl, and hope to eventually become a novelist.  It’s taken a while, but I’m getting to where I want to be in life.

Oh, and I love sports.  A LOT.

Uh, I dunno.  Internet?

There is no one central first memory, but I remember a lot of things from when I was three or four.  I remember our elderly neighbor Ray, who passed away when I was four, and his wife Agnes and his dog Scrappy.  I remember my fourth birthday, and getting a toy car and track.  I also remember Thanksgiving 1988, which may be my earliest memory of snow, and that Christmas.  I have a learning disability that actually made me learn reading faster, so I remember holing away in a corner in Sunday school, reading all the posters, and at home using those awesome Cooper Black fonted alphabet magnets we’d by at Clover all over our old Admiral refrigerator.  Also, we’d go to the movie theatre pretty often, and I remember watching Harry And The Hendersons, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, and even Star Trek V at places that only had two, four, at most eight screens!

So yeah, that’s what life was like before you were born, kids.