JIT: Thanks for the suggestion that people buy TIRE June 2000. I'm gonna go out on a limb as a result and say you must not be a jitter.
VintageTIRE: Nope. An admirer of the phenomenon, yes. Are there still many followers of the JIT out there?
JIT: It's died down enough to the point where I think it's a good idea to reprint TIRE, June 2000. I thought that would never happen.
VintageTIRE: What made you want to reprint a complete issue of TIRE, much less this one?
JIT: I write a series of books called FRAGMENTA. Initially they were incomplete works, previously unpublished stories, that sort of thing. Seven volumes in, I started looking around for things. TIRE, June 2000 is a thing I did. Plus, my current readers are largely unaware of my past New Age notoriety.
VintageTIRE: So the whole staff of TIRE walked out when you were made Guest Editor of the June 2000 issue?
JIT: They walked out after I fired them, yeah. Actually, Ruth fired them. I was just the messenger, a very enthusiastic messenger.
VintageTIRE: And then you assembled the whole issue yourself.
JIT: Yep. Wrote a bunch of it, and put together the regular features by sifting through the slush pile. I even jitted some more. It was a long month. Those guys were still using PageMaker. Blech.
VintageTIRE: Any particular memories from that month you'd like to share?
JIT: Ruth put me up in a hotel in Akron that used to be grain silos for Quaker Oats. It's a dorm for the U of Akron now.(Go Zips!)I'd roll out of bed and walk down to the TIRE office on Corley St. and get to work. Living out of a hotel room for a month puts you apart from the world. About two weeks in one of the staff worked up the nerve to ask me to settle their bet. The big money was on me being an unacknowledged Corley family member who'd fallen on hard times. I told them I was the Guest Editor of TIRE for one month because the magazine had ruined my life and I was being given a chance to have my say. They had to cancel the pool and give all the money back.
VintageTIRE: It's hard to say it ruined your life at this point, though, isn't it?
JIT: It closed a few doors, but the ground below my feet was soft enough for me to tunnel out. When I got to college, I had visions of being a lawyer. But halfway through my 1st semester, I got it in my head that if I got a Philosophy degree, that I could arm myself to take on the jitters, TIRE, and everybody and beat them at their own game. It was my choice, but it was also a response to what they did to me. When people try to steal your hair, you have to do something.
VintageTIRE: Steal your hair? You can't just leave that out there.
JIT: I graduated from a high school in west Texas that had a hair code. Back of your 'do had to be an inch above a dress collar whether you were wearing one or not. I rebelled by not getting a haircut all Summer and into the first Fall of college. The jitters started calling it my mane and I had a few incidents where people would sneak up on me to clip a lock of my hair. I was in Lubbock, TX then, which is a hell of a lot bigger and more accessible than Perryton, TX. Things weren't so bad in Perryton. The remoteness and small size meant I could see jitters coming a mile away. But Lubbock was the big city.
VintageTIRE: Well that's simple assault. You didn't call the police?
JIT: "Hi, Police? Strangers are trying to steal my hair. Hello? Hello?"
VintageTIRE: Okay, it does sound strange when you put it like that.
JIT: I was painted into a corner by the JIT madness. How do you get people to see any of this from my point of view? There's a small dedicated group of people convinced that when I was nine I drew a picture that accessed ancient knowledge and they don't want anything from me except my hair.
VintageTIRE: And more knowledge, right?
JIT: Beats me. I drew other pictures, but they could give a damn. Hey, thanks again for the reblog. I gotta go.
