I’m done.
It has been a sincere sensation and pure pleasure to invent and embody this sacred space for 27-and-a-half years, but it is time to close shop. The longest gig I’ve ever had that began the night I spent alone for the first time with the woman I would marry less than two years later and write about many times over here (much to her chagrin) is officially retired. This has been a space of humor, honesty, vitriol, and celebration. I have met so many cool people, worked with incredible managing editors and fellow scribes, and saw Reality Check become syndicated. It wasn’t for the money, that’s for damn sure; it was for the kick, the jazz, the purging of it. Thanks most of all to The Aquarian, who gave me this platform to bellow freely, undeterred, and never curtailed. I could be me here and I will miss that most of all.
But, I am done.
The idea of hanging this up first passed my mind two years ago. I could see the finish line; all stories have one, as do all lives, and I ain’t that young anymore and I don’t want to go out merely commenting on the sub-mental and the embarrassing societal and political fallouts of what is to come, which will be a shit show like no other. America has jumped the proverbial shark. If there is one thing I learned from the late, great Warren Zevon, once they piss in the punchbowl, put down the ladle and find your spirits elsewhere.
I certainly do not want to repeat the same feigned outrage and eye-rolling mockery from the first time around, which was historically awful, but sequels are far worse. It’s an insult to merely be American now, much less comment on it. I leave that to the younger, more fired up people who will have to survive after the carnage. And since, as stated many times for nearly three decades here, I traded in my integrity for a case Genesee Cream Ale and a Moped in 1983, so fuck it.
That is only part of it, really. I am just bored with the great unwashed. Time to pursue loftier subjects, which is pretty much everything else. I’ll concentrate primarily on my music journalism and authorship, which has been a huge part of what I do here and have done since the mid-to-late aughts. I’ll continue honoring my proud associate editor position at this publication. Plus, I have the finest managing editor an old crank could possibly hope for, the young, inimitable, hard-nosed, no nonsense creative fireball that is Debra Kate Schafer. I know she prefers I stay at this post, but she respects my decision, as she does my work, and as I do hers, so I shan’t let her down, as I won’t all the artists I hope to keep covering for this legendary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-inducted paper.
And so, I leave here with great memories of bandying the odd bauble with Ralph Nader, watching Parker Posey steal my car, endure screaming matches with Rage Against the Machine, getting hammered with Karl Rove, building bonfires on Lower Broadway with Dan Bern, running around the New York Yankees clubhouse after three straight World Series titles, laughing in the faces of governors and mayors, challenging sitting NJ congressmen to fistfights in print, battling freedom of speech lawsuits with the ACLU, and having the cops investigate the non-existent canon on my front lawn. I got a nodding smile from Hunter S. Thompson after the publishing of my first compendium, Fear No Art, which was to be the name of this column until that magnificent bastard, Chris Uhl, changed it to Reality Check and stuck me in the Reality Check News & Information Desk, which mostly stayed vacant at AQ headquarters in Little Falls, New Jersey, beyond the rare exception of my occasional and noisy visits, so the staff could see I was no figment of Uhl’s twisted imagination.
I also need to evoke the name of Dan Davis before shoving off. The King of the Wild Frontier hired me first at the East Coast Rocker to write pop culture features and a sports column, before Uhl nabbed me for here and led to meeting Alice Cooper, Ani DiFranco, Tory Amos, Lucina Williams, Brian fucking Wilson, and more. I smoked cigars with Pat Buchanan and hung out with Bill Bradley and Walt Frazier backstage at MSG. And in 2004, handed my Republican National Convention credentials to a homeless man on 8th Avenue. Watching him stroll proudly through the press gate is still my finest memory.
Mostly, it was damn fun playing a dime-store Mark Twain, who once wrote, “There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce,” finding fault and uncovering disgust in most things humans do. I need to make sure you know this: I have never and will never take being published in any form for granted. It is an honor to have written and have been read. That is all I’d wanted since I can remember and to do it here for this long is beyond comprehension. I am a lucky bastard. My wish is for everyone, writer or not, to find that place and the souls that get you and let you be.
Which brings me to my final yawp…
I have proven three absolutes in my 27-plus years here: One, humans are a virus and must go, soon. Second, 99.9% of religious people are full of shit, always, and finally, the rise of anti-intellectualism in the late twentieth century into this godforsaken one has finally come to fruition. I called it. We are now a nation of Doctor Thompson’s screwheads and the doomed and they speak for the rest of us, who just want to live free or die trying. For that, I take my final victory lap. All of it came to be. I am, in the end, a doomsayer prophet, as with 9/11 when I got the front cover for the first time predicting that bin Laden was going to take something down back in 1998. And now we find ourselves at the brink of fascism as all western nations have at one time or another. I wish I didn’t have the gift, but I do, and today I leave the heavy lifting to some other poor slob to dissect. I hope someone who still cares steps up, because the caring is no longer in the old boy.
However, I am not a complete bummer on the way out. I leave you with perhaps my favorite sentiments by one of the few people who were worth a damn that this country has produced, like Thomas Paine, Harry Houdini, Dorothy Parker, Charles Bukowski, Lenny Bruce, James Baldwin, George Carlin, Aretha Franklin, Alice Cooper, and Prince Rogers Nelson –Ms. Matilda Joslyn Gage, who proffered, “When all humanity works for humanity, when the life-business of men and women becomes one united partnership in all matters which concern each, when neither sex, race, color, or previous condition is held as a bar to the exercise of human faculties, the world will hold in its hands the promise of a millennium which will work out its own fulfillment.”
Good luck with that. Hope it goes better for us than Gage or Jesus or Ghandi.
But, as for Campion, over and out, and remember: NEVER SURRENDER.
James Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus”, “Midnight For Cinderella“, “Y”. “Shout It Out Loud – The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon”, “Accidently Like a Martyr – The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon”, “Take a Sad Song… The Emotional Currency of “Hey Jude” and coming in Spring of 2025, “Revolution – Prince, the Band, the Era.”
