He skipped 1st and 2nd grade and started school at Bethany Lutheran School (since destroyed) in Naperville, then moved on to Woodridge School and Goodrich School, Downers grove South High School (graduated 1974). After a serious suicide attempt by pills on October 26, 1974 during the Mary Tyler Moore show, he was committed to Lake Shore Mental Health Hospital for a month were he had shock treatments. At this time he had serious physical and mental health problems that were misdiagnosed.
During this time he attended Northern Illinois University in DeKalb (September 1975-January 1976), the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn and the University of Illinois at Chicago, somehow acquiring 3 years of credits (no degrees). His malaise was diagnosed as "cerebral allergies" in July 1979 and he proceeded to take a treatment of weekly allergy shots for the next 22 years (last shot July 12, 2001). He was always a music lover.
Played trombone 1965-76 in school bands. Listened only to classical music --especially artfaggotty 20th century music-- from May 1968 until April 1975. In the summers of 1975-6 he had a job delivering papers to paper boys and was forced to listen to pop music on Am radio, thus developing an appreciation for the art form. After discovering Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart in 1975, his favorites for many years, he made a recording on February 4, 1977 in a house in Oak Brook, (a rich suburb - house had indoor swimming pool) of himself yelping faux beefheartisms with a 70s band that became an improv noise band for a night. He can't remember the names of any of the musicians.
He also wrote a lot of poetry that had a certain freshness because of the subject's natural talent, but whose subsequent loss is not overly regrettable. The only poem that might have survived was the one the student body president of the college of Dupage had his secretary type up and hang on his office wall in 1977. Also in 1977, subject ran for student body vice president (slogan:Thax Douglas wants to be vice president of your body) and had a radio show entitled "Are there cucumbers after Salad?" where he played aforementioned artfag 20th century kitsch: Luc Ferrari, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Mauricio Kagel etc. He also had a weekly all-nite radio show on WUIC_FM in 1979, where he played "college"rock music such as Public Image, the Residents, etc, and took phone calls which weren't alot since it was a 10 watt station.
The subject has had 2 real jobs, one at the University of Illinois Hospital 1981-1990 where he was an emergency room admission clerk midnights, where he put people's green card info into a computer and made dying patients sign a form saying they realized medicine was not an exact science. He moved back into Chicago on May 2, 1988, first in Rogers Park, then mostly Wicker park and ravenswood. His second job was at Video Monitoring Servcies where he made typed copies of radio commercials and typed synopses of them into the computer. 1992-1997. He lost his job on November 4, 1997 and has not been employed since, except for a temp stint in March-July 2001.
Thax discovered literature on September 22, 1979 when he read Flannry O'Connor's short story Revelation in a Composition textbook. He read O'Connor and moved on to Joyce Carol Oates, his favorite writer for many many years, reading all her available work from October 1979-June 1980. He audited some poetry writing classes 1979-1983 at the UIC but decided academic poetry was not for him. He wrote nothing until 1987 when a UIC student, Carl Watson, introduced him to the Green Mill Poetry Slam on Sunday nights. He attended this and other poetry open mikes until 1991, continuing sans the Green Mill until 1998.
He has had an ambition since May 10, 1989 when he made his first mimeographed anthology of being a touring poet, and actually did some touring in 1989-93 reading in galleries and cofeeshops in Detroit, Cleveland, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Madison, Columbus and Dayton. For some reason he stopped. He had the idea to write poems for bands in 1994 but due to low self-esteem didn't start doing so until 1997. Losing his job became a catalyst to once more try and take his career seriously but the way to aesthetic self-fulfillment can be a long one.
by Thax Douglas, 2005