My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

or, the Aaron Schatz Life Story

I was born in New Jersey, then lived in Houston, Orange County CA, and Boston.  My dad is a rabbi so we moved around a lot. At Sharon High School in Sharon, MA, I was the long-haired math team superstar and played in a band called The Jamaican Rubber Company Presents Spiro and Vago Sing.  I grew a beard at age sixteen.  It was a strange time.  I then went to Brown University where I was an economics major and joined the Zeta Delta Xi co-ed fraternity, for which I am now head of the alumni association (self-appointed, nobody else wanted the job).

I was also very active in the campus radio station, WBRU, which is in the strange situation of being a fully professional station run by college students.  I rose through the ranks from news intern to anchor and then switched to the DJ side where I eventually did the morning show to over 40,000 listeners each morning.  I decided to make radio my career after that and spent a summer looking for work, doing some part-time shifts at WFNX in Boston, and DJing WBRU's weekly dance night at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel in Providence.  At the end of the summer I was hired to work nights at WKRO in Daytona Beach, Florida.

My dream was that I would go to Daytona and revel in the babes and beach, and the ease of a radio career.  Instead, I hated all the empty-headed Daytona chicks with their plastic smiles and their more plastic breasts.  It was not a good town for an Ivy League-educated semi-religious Jew with political and cultural interests, and Orlando, 45 minutes away, was about as fake.   On top of this, WKRO was having a hard time standing out as the small company which owned it increased its holdings to include a classic rock station, a talk station, and a Top 40 station.  The Program Director for WKRO was responsible for all four stations, and he was spread a bit thin.  I eventually worked my way up to the Music Director position, which allegedly meant I had a say in what we played but in actuality meant nothing except I got to bicker with record promo reps all the time.  The Program Director, feeling the stress of running four disparate stations simultaneously, reacted by making most decisions himself rather than delegating authority.  So I was living in this hideous city with very few friends in order to follow a career path that was now unfulfilling.  Through a series of events which I won't go through here, I got myself fired and came home to New England.  By the way, it turns out I was correct about the station's strategy being problematic -- it went country in 2000.

It didn't take long to realize I was happier living near friends and being out of radio than it was living in the podunk south and being in radio, so I decided to figure out how to use that econ degree.  This took me a year of unemployment and hideously humbling temp work, but I eventually found my place at the International Data Corporation where I was a research analyst covering disk storage systems - EMC, Compaq, IBM, and the like. However, I decided I wanted to work with products that were more consumer-focused, so I moved to the Venture Development Corporation (yes, I went from IDC to VDC) where I was a research analyst covering 12-volt electronics.  That means car electronics, including car stereos, in-car navigation and computers, and mobile video.  I have learned that if you have a really loud car stereo, women in bikinis will flock to you.  I learned that from advertisements.

This job also proved to be unfulfilling, so I recently moved to Lycos, where I became a producer in the Search and Navigation department beginning in July 2000.  I produced "integrated components" for entertainment and sports, which meant I got to do things like figure out what type of boy band materials girls were looking for on the net.  I also got to logically sort porn words so that "breast cancer" didn't bring up our porn links, but "hairy women" did.

As fulfilling as it was to look into the darkness that is America's desire for Internet porn, my desire when I arrived at Lycos was always to write the Lycos 50, our daily column (and weekly countdown) detailing the top terms being searched on the Lycos search engine.  I approached the site's author, Fritz Holznagel, asking to apprentice as his "vacation sub" and was told that Fritz was leaving the company.  That gave me the opportunity to audition and then get the job of a lifetime -- working with all the silly pop culture that I've been obsessed with my whole life, doing market research that is as consumer-focused as it can possibly be, and doing radio and TV appearances that I was trained for during my WBRU days.  I've now been writing the Lycos 50 and representing Terra Lycos in the public eye since November 2000.

That's my job, of course, but it says nothing about my personal life.  On June 2, 2002, I was married to the beautiful Kathryn Forbush at Temple Beth Shalom in Westborough, Massachusetts.  Kathryn and I met on New Year's Eve 2000 and had our first kiss at midnight.  How's that for romantic.  I proposed in March 2001 but we had a long, hard engagement.  It's all fine now, though, and I have to say that married life is both giddy and goofy.  Kathryn now teaches second grade at the Rashi School, a Reform Jewish day school in Newton, and we live in Belmont, the town that cell phone towers forgot.

I'll be updating this site continuously* so please email me and tell me that you liked it, or add to the guestbook.   Remember, this site has been blessed by the presence of Humpty Hump.  He gets stupid, he shoots an arrow like cupid, and he uses words that don't mean nothing, like "lupid."

-- Aaron Schatz

* Yes, this what I wrote in 1999, and then I didn't update the site from the summer of 2000 until November of 2002.  Such are the ways of the Web.