About Me — Patrick Metzger
This is not a linear narrative
*Please scroll past my enormous head to read bio below.*
Hi.Top level:
I’m interested in the intersection of the mysterious and the absurd, which is to say life.
Roles I’ve had: student, dishwasher, punk rock singer, office clerk, various types of manager, including program, project, and product, bank executive, political candidate, TV producer and director, teacher, freelance writer, stay-at-home dad.
I believe that periodic self-reinvention is a necessity.
Random Facts
I come from a long line of low-end politicians. My paternal great-grandfather was a minister with some stern tedious Protestant sect who ran for the US Congress and lost, settling for a term in the Vermont House of Representatives. My grandfather was Mayor of Metuchen, NJ, and I have a great-great-uncle who was both in the US House of Representatives and Mayor of New Brunswick NJ.
When I was a kid and my parents went away overnight, they would often leave us in the care of Patsy and Penny, the twin little people babysitters. I have vivid memories of them chasing me and my siblings around the house at night with the lights off, all of us screaming.
It annoys me when people say things like “I love animals because they’re so honest.” True, but only because they’re stupid. Your dog would con you out of your life savings and buy dog food with it if he had the brains to put together a viable Ponzi scheme.
I used to do the Metro crossword on the subway, secretly hoping that people were watching me race through it and thinking “wow, he sure is smart.”
I’ve always wanted a windbreaker that said “Security” on the back.
I don’t understand art and don’t really like it. I can get into a nice oil painting of tall ships at sea, but drop me in an art museum and I might as well be a chimp at a lecture on quantum physics.
Ditto for classical music. Pachelbel’s Canon is nice, and the parts of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons they use in ads for fancy shopping malls, but most everything else just eludes me.
People who use the word “party” as a verb need to be punched. Fortunately, as my contemporaries age, the situation rarely arises.
I regret not being more promiscuous when I was young.
When I was in my early twenties, I thought it would impress women in bars if I got extremely hammered drinking shots of Jack Daniels. If it did, no one ever mentioned it.
I have an intermittent fear of flying, which manifests itself without warning and which I address with Ativan and red wine.
I used to be an early adopter of technology like cameras, music players, and mobile phones, as well as an early breaker and loser of technology like cameras, music players, and mobile phones. Nowadays there are only phones so it’s easier.
As a kid, I feared that if I didn’t say the Our Father several times before I went to bed I would be possessed by the devil. Props to Hollywood and the Roman Catholic Church for many sleepless nights.
Possibly related, in childhood I was obsessed with the paranormal — UFOs, ghosts, fairies, anything — and the apocalypse. This hasn’t changed much in adulthood, although I’m a little more discreet about it. Actually, no, I’m not.
Climate change has kept me awake nights since I first started looking into it around 2001. That’s why I’m such a fun conversationalist.
When I eat a meal, I eat the part I dislike most — usually vegetables — as quickly as possible. I then try to space out things I like, say a club sandwich and fries, so I finish them simultaneously and savour the combination of flavours to the end.
I like most people as individuals, but believe that in a pack we’re as smart as drunk hamsters.
I have a tough time feeling empathy for the tragedies of strangers on the news, no matter how many people die or how horribly. This is odd because my own death is a matter of considerable concern to me.
When I was a teenage punk rocker, I said I would never sell out, but to my surprise I have sold out frequently and enthusiastically over the past 30-odd years. Sorry, Joe Strummer.
I have a black belt in Tae Kwon Do.
Years ago, before I was a dad, I sat on the subway across from a young boy who was bouncing up and down with joy and excitement because it was his first time on a subway train. For some reason it made me want to cry, and I‘’ve never been able to figure out why.
As I get older I become less tolerant of cold and more comfortable with the heat. Clearly I am moments away from a retirement community in Arizona where I will drive a golf cart, wear Hawaiian shirts to social events, and eat dinner at 4 pm.
I only use my left ear when I talk on a phone. If I’m using a handset, it doesn’t really work on speaker.
If you got this far, thanks for reading. Please feel free to check out my other stuff. I wrote it for you.
