Chapter 3: Jack Dean makes paranoia a viable career path
By the wall clock, it was 9:15pm. Jack Dean had no plan to still be on campus after celebrating accomplishments and attending end of semester ceremonies for faculty and staff, but he had grades to turn in and he needed to have that task completed before Monday at noon. Normally, he would have saved some of that work for Saturday, but since he was scheduled to hit the road with his former band mates and long-time friends Mork Thompson and Billie Schmidt, he needed Saturday and Sunday for attending personal tasks preparing to accompany his friends on the first of many road trips supporting Thompson’s research project searching for the fibrillating heart of our divided nation. Fortunately, he was able to click “submit” on the final class roster before 10:00pm. Now he could head home, get some sleep, and get his bizniz done in time to check in with the gang Sunday afternoon.
Back in the day, Jack played a crucial role in the Grunge band (The Forks) with Billie and Professor Thompson, stage name “Mork T.”. Jack was not just a perfectly serviceable bass player, he was also the glue that kept Mork T., primary songwriter and the group’s center of gravity and Billie Schmidt, their kinetic hot-headed drummer from flying apart. A bit of a paranoia case, Jack could sense when trouble was brewing. Not only between his mercurial companions but also with promoters, venue owners, and fans. Like… he had a 6th sense antenna for trouble. Fortunately, these proclivities served him well after the band broke up and each member saught their own post rock-n-roll life.
Again, Jack was a bit of a paranoid, not pathological, but enough to make sleep a bit of a challenge. His nighttime MO consisted of a couple hits of primo weed and a beer or two on weekends. On this occasion, he skipped the beer and hit the hay after packing his ganja back in it’s “safe” place. Tomorrow would be dedicated to making preparations for weeks on the road conducting focus group interviews and tending to logistics with the assistance of a US road atlas and a new GPS app sporting various celebrity personalities for voices. Jack called the app, “Siri’s Drunk Sister (SDS)” because it had led him astray a couple times, and he felt he needed to cross-reference questionable “back road” routes with the “official” road atlas. No worries, the extra vigilance was worth the trouble because the newest build had Samuel L. Jackson and Roseanne Barr among others giving voice instructions. Colorful remonstrations issued forth whenever a driver made turns not aligned with SDS instructions… often hilarious.
And like Billie, Jack was excited to be part of Professor Thompson’s team as he was also on the university’s “tenure track” and so needed publication credits for his curriculum vitae. More importantly, he was excited to be traveling with his old band mates, older, wiser, no longer dealing with youthful angst and drunken drama that marked many of the “good ol’ days”.
One reason the gang’s checkered past was even more colorful than most was Jack’s hapless talent for attracting trouble. And though he was no longer soliciting extra-curricular rendezvous with young admirers of that rock-steady bootie-movin’ groove for which he was regionally famous, he still possessed an animal magnetism that had to be judiciously regulated on campus. Jack was damn good at repelling amorous advances by the many young students populating the campus. But, as a cyber-security specialist, not many of his direct charges were of the female persuasion. And, for some odd reason, his male LGBT students weren’t susceptible to his particular brand of pheromone.
And so, the gang was reunited, Billie had taken the Chool Bus on a maiden voyage over one of the more challenging mountain passes on a pilgrimage to visit Owl Farm in Woody Creek Colorado, the home and redoubt sanctuary of her favorite cultural critic Hunter S. Thompson. So, with the Chool Bus road-tested from the High Plains to the top of the world, the Forks were ready to take the nation’s temperature, coast to coast.
First stop, Fort Collins Colorado. Professor T.’s research included survey questionnaires, the type used by political pollsters, where participants are drawn from college towns and rural working-class communities with strong religious identifications. This data would be juxtaposed with the face-to-face focus-group work conducted by the reunited Forks making their way from state to state in a rolling home converted for traveling rock and roll refugees, the Chool Bus. Appointments with off-the beaten path communities as well as inner-city diverse-demographic groups are made and the tentative itinerary was crafted to be flexible enough to have alternate destinations in case any of the original appointments proved unworkable for whatever reason. Jack Dean, the paranoid tenure-track cyber-security instructor with a history of attracting trouble and a terrific bass player with tons of soul. No way Billie and Professor T. would trade Jack in for a less troublesome model, the Forks loved their mildly paranoid groovelicious partner.
NEXT WEEK:
Chapter 4: The Forks embark, and Professor T. learns the perceived value of privacy in a “social media” world.
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