HOPress is proud to be doing promotion and marketing for the talented and funny Tim Jones who released his first book You’re Grounded for Life: Misguided Parenting Strategies That Sounded Good At That Time. Available on Lulu.com, this book will make you laugh out loud. Check out Tim’s author page at HOPress too. We will be posting interviews, reviews and press about the author and his book. Here is a print interview with one of HO’s most popular writers.
- Tell us about Tim Jones (where you were born, family, and career?)
I was born during the early formative phase of our nation’s history, way, way back before there were computers, cell phones, microwave ovens, or even VCRs. There was no such thing as a remote control. You actually had to go to your television set, which was roughly the size of a Honda Fit, and manually change the channels – all three of them. Yes, I am a baby boomer, born in the 1950s, back in a time when there were absolutely no problems of any kind in our great nation – unless you happened to be black, Native American, a woman, elderly, gay, physically disabled in any way, or chose the wrong religion. Then, yeah, life may have presented you with a few problems to overcome.
I was one of five kids – and according to my father, I routinely ranked among his top four favorite
children – that is, until my disastrous tenth grade high school science experiment, in which I literally blew up our kitchen. (This is 100% true and the source for one of my favorite blog pieces).
I grew up in Albany, New York and attended to the same all-boys military high school with a one-inch hair length regulation from grades one through twelve. The school was founded in 1819 and, well, by the time I arrived as a first grader in 1961, it had almost progressed in its thinking to the early 20th century. Can I just say, based on my own experience, I heartily recommend sending your impressionable young son to a military school like the one I attended if you want to make sure he gets picked on for his nerdy short haircut (remember – this was the sixties and seventies) and grows up brimming with lack of self-confidence about the opposite sex.
With regard to girls, I was a slow starter as a young man. My first date was not until tenth grade, and I recall it almost like it was yesterday. My older brother picked me and my date up from the movie theater (because I was too young to drive). As I opened the rear car door to let my date into the back seat, she got in and then quietly asked me to please sit in the front seat. This may surprise you but that was our first – and final – date. I am happy to report that the emotional scars from that experience have almost completely healed a mere 45 years later.
I went to University of Virginia where I graduated with Highest Distinction and was even inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society. The ONLY cool thing about my Phi Beta Kappa induction was that during the private ceremony, they actually taught us the secret Phi Beta Kappa handshake. (Honest to God, there is one). And I am happy to reveal it to you for $10.
I went on to get my law degree and my MBA at The Ohio State University, making me one of the most unnecessarily over-educated humor writers in the country. I never did use my law degree but I learned a lot of impressive Latin phrases that I periodically drop into conversations just to impress women. But enough about my law school career. Like I always say, Ego amo lardum. (That means, I like bacon.)
For most of my career, I was a sales and marketing manager. And I would like to say, I was incredibly good at it. But if I did, then I’d be lying. For many years I managed newspaper advertising sales teams – because I was really good at picking dying industries that had no future in them like major metro newspapers.
At one point, I worked for a start-up company in Miami for a few years in the early 1980s and swore I would not date any coworker because dating coworkers always ends badly – as it did for my wife, Michele, who I met at that employer, and she is still married to me some thirty years later. My wife is Canadian. But we have an agreement: She is willing to let me make jokes about her being a Canadian – which I do in my humor blog – so long as she is allowed to tell everyone she meets that her husband is an idiot. I am comfortable with this agreement. And if I can be serious for a moment, I am blessed to be married to an amazing woman and someone who actually puts up with a husband who on a good day has the maturity of a 15-year-old.
We have two wonderful daughters, Rachel and Emily, both of whom we adopted as babies from China. So, I am a minority in my own household – the only native born American and the only male. I am not sure this quite qualifies me as an oppressed minority – except when they would all gang up on me and force me to sit through an episode of Gossip Girls with them. Now that’s just plain emotional cruelty.
But I love our daughters more than I can put into words. And yes, they have given me tons of fodder for my humor writing over the years. And they are both in college and doing very well – this despite the fact that they grew up in a partially Caucasian family with me as their soccer dad / chauffeur. I am blessed to actually have somehow survived through the hormonal hurricane that was their teenage years. Now I actually have a great relationship with both of my daughters – that is, just so long as I don’t try to hold put my arm around them or kiss them on the forehead in public.
My wife and I moved to Seattle in the early 1990s and love the Pacific Northwest. It has a reputation for raining a lot and being cloudy all the time. But don’t believe the negative hype. This is one of the sunniest, driest places in the entire – so long as you visit us between August 1st and August 15th. Otherwise, yeah, it’s pretty grey around here.
Now that our girls are for the most part grown up and living on their own, Michele and I decided in 2014 to move to an island. It’s been a dream of ours for years. We now live on Camano Island, where on a clear day (between August 1st and August 15th) we look out over Puget Sound and the Cascade Mountains and see snow-covered Mount Baker. We are truly blessed.
I retired from the corporate world in the summer of 2015 and started working on my first humor book – about good parenting, because it’s a topic I know almost nothing about.
- Your humor is so relatable. When did you start writing and when did you know you had such a flair for humor?
First of all, I have to take issue with your premise. If you ask either of my two daughters, now age 21 and 20, they will quickly tell you their father THINKS he’s funny but really he’s totally lame. (I hear that word “lame” a lot when my kids are describing their father.)
For years I have written short humorous essays for various occasions – for a tribute to a friend on his 50th birthday, or as a toast at a friend’s wedding. Every Christmas I would write these long annual “year in review” letters I would send out with our Christmas cards. As years went by, I found that I devoted less and less space in these letters to what actually had happened over the past year and more and more space to just making up a funny story. And people started telling me over and over, “Tim, when are you going to start really pursuing your humor writing?” In retrospect, it occurs to me that perhaps they were telling me I really wasn’t very funny and were simply asking me when I was going to start writing anything that resembled humor. Hmmm.
And then one day, coming out of a movie theater about a film where one of the characters decides to write a blog (about recipes), my wife said to me, “That’s what you should do. You should write a humor blog. You would be so good at it. And you’re not getting any younger!” That was September 2009. And I have been doing a weekly humor blog ever since. View from the Bleachers. I write about just about any topic under the sun. It does not really matter what I write about. My girls will still think it’s lame.
- Parenting from the dad’s perspective is definitely different than from a mother’s point of you. What are some of the key differences for you?
I learned a long time ago that the secret to a happy, successful marriage is that every husband needs to learn the following phrase: “I’m sorry, honey. You are totally right. I was wrong. I apologize.” It helps if you can say it without dripping sarcasm. The fact is that as the father of two girls and the only male in the house, there are naturally some subjects that are out of bounds to discuss with my daughters. As they entered puberty, the job of talking about tampons and training bras were topics I was more than happy to let my wife handle with our girls.
The odd thing in our marriage is that I am much more the touchy-feeling emotional type. Heck, I still tear up every time in Love Actually when Colin Firth proposes in the restaurant in his mangled Portuguese. My wife, on the other hand, is the calmer, less emotional member of our partnership. But one thing my wife and I totally agreed on was the importance of our countless conversations with our girls as they were young about the need to make good choices – a message they regularly embraced by rolling their eyes and texting their friends about how lame we were as parents.
The biggest difference between my wife and me in terms of parenting probably was not so much about our parenting approaches but rather how we liked to spend our one-on-one time with our girls. I have always been into sports. My wife, on the other hand, has no idea how many innings there are in a football game. So I was the parent who taught our girls how to ride their bikes and throw a baseball and golf. Is it my fault that our younger daughter threw a wild pitch which shattered our dining room window when she was only eight? Perhaps, since it happened while she and I were playing catch. But in my defense, she tried to throw a split-finger fastball. And I had signaled for her to throw a changeup.
- What interests inspire your writing besides parenting? What makes you say, “Damn, I have to write about that one?”
Often it is the odd, quirky news story that catches my attention. Like the time I heard a three-sentence news blurb about an Argentine prison that was suffering from budget cuts and did not have enough guards to man all the guard towers. So in one of the guard towers, they actually manned it with – and I’m not making this up – a soccer ball. And the prisoners somehow found out and escaped. So I wrote a piece called A Solution to Our Prison Problem – Soccer Balls based on that.
Another time, during an NFL referees strike a few years ago, there was a lot of news about how horrible the replacement referees were – to the point that thousands of outraged fans demanded replacing the replacement refs. So it occurred to me, “Wouldn’t it be funny if they hired the sales clerks from Foot Locker stores – since they all dress like referees to begin with” That prompted me to write a piece about the new NFL Footlocker referees. It took me less than sixty minutes to write what to this day is one of the best received pieces I ever wrote.
But sometimes, it’s as simple as observing a daily occurrence between my wife and me. We totally disagree on the proper way to load the dishwasher. And for years, I would whine about how she was doing it all wrong. The result was a piece called Don’t let your dishwasher destroy your marriage – which got so much coverage that some marriage counselor in New Jersey wrote me asking if she could print this out as a brochure to give to couples she was counseling.
- What are your goals as a humorist? Do you see more books in the future?
This entire experience of humor writing has really just sort of evolved in an unplanned way for me. I had no idea when I walked out of that movie theater in 2009 with my wife that I would still be writing a weekly humor column six and a half years later. Over time, my writing has been picked up by several humor websites, including, I am very proud to say, Humor Outcasts. The print newspaper Funny Times started carrying me last fall. And of course, the local community newspaper where I live carries my article on a weekly basis. And occasionally some newspaper out of nowhere will stumble onto my blog and ask to reprint one of my articles.
After writing some 250 posts over these past six years, I realized I had enough content on just the topic of parenting to create a book. The final result was YOU’RE GROUNDED FOR LIFE – Misguided Parenting Strategies That Sounded Good at the Time. Make no mistake about it. This is NOT a parenting book. This is a humor book about how NOT to parent. And I could never have written if it weren’t for my two daughters, without whose endless persistence in attempting to ingest dangerous objects as toddlers, refusing to keep their room clean as teenagers, and a litany of other devious efforts to do everything in their power to push their father to the brink of emotional exhaustion over the past twenty years, my book would not have been possible.
As for more books, I am absolutely thinking about it. I have written extensively about business and the workplace so there could be a book in there. I will be curious to see how my first book does. I did some rough math as to how many books I need to sell to make a meaningful profit. And from what my numbers tell me, I will lose money on every sale. But I plan to make it up on volume.