Featured Essay: More Than I Bargained For: My Year With IHTOV

by Jim Parisi

On the evening of February 2, 2025, I sat on my couch, eleven days removed from knee replacement surgery—my second in the span of three months—mobile but limited to using a cane, off the opioids that rendered the first five days after surgery a swoony but manageable ordeal, and dreading the return to work the next day, even if “going to work" meant sitting on the same sofa and typing on the same laptop I was using to kill time scrolling through my Bluesky feed. 

But on that otherwise forgettable Sunday night in captivity, a post popped up that would somehow, improbably knock me out of my post-op ennui. A post that would have ramifications I never would have imagined when I decided, uncharacteristically, to hit send on a reply.

The post in question was a request for someone to look over an essay about Joe Jackson. The requestor was a woman I knew only vaguely as a prolific poster on Bluesky, and from occasionally reading her website. The website was called—spoiler alert!—ihavethatonvinyl.com, and the writer requesting what I’m sure she thought would be nothing than a cursory check for typos was none other than site founder and reigning empress of all things vinyl, Michele Catalano. 

I liked what I had read on the site, and Michele’s frequent Bluesky posts were among the highlights of my feed in the month or so that I had been following her, but our only interaction prior to that night had been my reply to a post in which she wrote about her insomnia, a topic with which I was all too familiar. (She liked my recommendation for cognitive behavioral therapy, which had cured my nocturnal troubles, but I think she was just being polite.)

Putting myself forward to offer up my services to someone I didn’t know is not something that comes naturally to me. But three months of being held captive will make a man do things he never thought he could bring himself to try (that and a year of therapy). It didn’t hurt that the request was for editing—one of the few tasks in which I am confident in my abilities—and the subject of the essay was Joe Jackson. I’ve been a fan since his first album—although I must admit that I had checked out on him by the late ‘80s—and I’d been on a Joe Jackson kick for the past couple of years. I was confident that I could nail the assignment and sent Michele a DM in which I laid out my editing experience and assured her that I had “Joe Jackson bona fides out the wazoo." That was enough to get me the job.

When I started reading the Google doc Michele shared, I knew I had made the right call. This was someone I could work with in the future, if she would have me. The essay was what I would come to recognize as a typical Michele piece: a story about her past, built around a song or a musical artist, with music playing a central role in how the story unfolds. This one featured a childhood friendship that had gone sour but rebounded briefly over a shared love for Joe Jackson’s album Look Sharp. It’s a classic Michele essay, bittersweet edition. (Don’t worry, I’ll have plenty to say later on about the bitter-traumatic essays that make up a significant portion of Michele’s oeuvre.)

Considering that I didn’t know Michele, and that she had no reason to trust me as an editor, I’m frankly amazed at the cheekiness I showed in carrying out what amounted to an audition tape. I made a bunch of copy edits, many of them the usual corrections any respectable editor would expect to make, but a few merely stylistic to correct usage that wasn’t wrong but just wasn’t how I would have done it. Those changes would lay the groundwork for a house style I would develop over the next few months, but they could have been perceived as presumptuous by a writer less generous than Michele. 

Perhaps out of insecurity, or maybe it’s just the way I would normally operate, I left an obscene number of notes to explain my decisions in the file. And I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to pepper Michele with asides about Joe Jackson’s catalogue, a precursor to what would become a running dialogue over the course of the next year. Nobody likes being edited, but it goes down easier when the instrument of your misery explains himself and softens the blow with amusing anecdotes. At least that’s how I saw it (and Michele concurred, much to my relief).

I was excited to see the essay on the site the next day, as well as Michele’s expression of thanks for the editing assistance in her post promoting the essay on Bluesky. A reasonably adjusted person would have volunteered to be Michele’s go-to editor whenever she thought an essay needed a second look.  Not being such a reasonably adjusted person, I did not seize that opportunity. Instead, I waited for Michele to make the next move, which came a few days later, when she made another public call for editorial assistance. 

To show how eager I was to work with Michele, I leapt at the opportunity to edit her essay on the Doors. The Doors! To put it mildly, I am not a fan of the band, and I have nothing but contempt for the mythology that continues to this day around Jim Morrison. But I put aside my prejudices and gave the Doors the same treatment I had given Joe Jackson. It helped that Michele’s essay was typically insightful and entertaining, and that she indulged my stream of comments in the file, offering sympathy for my plight along with justifications for her inexplicable (to me) love for the band.

Once again, I didn’t come right out and volunteer for the ad hoc editing position. How little self-esteem does a guy have if he can’t even put himself up for a nonpaying gig to edit a writer with whom he had begun to forge a rapport? Apparently, so little that I waited until Michele’s next public call for an edit, this one coming so late in the evening that she mentioned that the “usual editor" probably wouldn’t be available. Not so fast, lady! Was I still bored, still mostly immobile, still sleeping on a hospital bed on the first floor of the house because going upstairs was an ordeal? Check, check, and check. Damn right I was available. 

I answered the call and got her essay on Jesus Christ, Superstar back to her that night, telling her when I sent the file that she could just ask me directly if she needed someone to look over her work. Despite the minor speed bump a few days later, when an essay written in the middle of the night went up without an edit—I choked back my tears the next morning to tell her I’m sure the essay was fine without the edits (it was, but when I read it, I noted the copy edits I would have made)—over the next few weeks I assumed the position of unofficially official copy editor of Michele’s essays for ihavethatonvinyl.com. (Except for one extraordinary occasion, Michele has never enlisted me to edit guest essays.) 

I liked reading Michele’s essays, and she claimed to like working with me, despite her distaste for being edited. It was a good match of writer and editor. I even got to compile my own style guide—I know, it’s every boy’s dream—whose title, What Would Bryan Adam’s Do?,  came to me after I used “Summer of ‘69” as the model for how we would handle the style for references to seasons. (It turns out that Mr. Adams is quite the stickler.) Just as you suspected, it’s all fun and games beyond the scenes at IHTOV.

Things rolled along like that for a few weeks. Michele would send me an essay every couple of days; I would make my changes in the Google doc; she would approve all my changes, even ones I told her I thought were dubious or overstepping my bounds. We were getting to know each other better, not only through our collaboration on Michele’s essays but also in our frequent DMs on BlueSky. 

Then came what I think of as Trauma Week, during which Michele hit me with a series of essays that dug so deep into events from her past that each edit was the emotional equivalent of being thrown into the ring with Mike Tyson. The Kevin Devine essay? Body blow. (I cried foul that Michele had not provided me with a trigger warning before I wandered unawares into that one.) The Nick Cave wedding song? Left hook to the jaw. R.E.M.’s Reckoning? Gut punch. And Radiohead’s “Let Down”? A cheap shot below the belt. In the interest of brevity, I will leave it there. But rest assured, the hits kept coming, sometimes twice a day. 

Even as I expressed my condolences to Michele about what she had gone through, I marveled at her ability to write so openly about herself. I also marveled at her ability to write at all hours of the day and night (many mornings I woke up at six to a new essay in my inbox), to write with such much emotional depth even when she was high, to write a coherent narrative in one draft.  (Michele’s ability to write so honestly would have a profound effect on my own writing. When you see someone making herself so vulnerable on the page, you can’t help but write more honestly about yourself.) 

After that week or two of deeply emotional essays, sometimes two in the same day, Michele’s output slowed down. She also made a conscious effort to sprinkle in more stories that focused on happy memories. Our working relationship took on a comfortable pattern of two or three essays per week (no longer per day, thankfully), sometimes more if Michele was feeling particularly inspired. 

As I was recently unemployed and still recovering from my two knee surgeries, I welcomed the arrival of each of Michele’s essays in my Google Docs queue. And I looked forward to our frequent text interactions. Those conversations progressed over time from discussions about essays or music to more personal details about our lives to where we stand currently, an avalanche of messages back and forth from morning to night, about any topic that comes to mind.

Michele is the first online-only friend I have ever had. She is much more adept at social media and has forged many personal relationships over the years with people she has met online. She also posts more on most days than I do in an entire year. Nothing about this friendship should work. But somehow it does. As I liked to say early on, our crazies intersected enough for us to be able to relate to each other. Michele put it more diplomatically when she said we had similar personalities. That was true to an extent, even if you could never gauge that from our online presences. A Venn diagram of what’s going on in each of our brains would have significant areas of overlap. But even our differences have had positive effects on each of us. 

About those differences. I stand a full (since my knee surgery straightened my left leg) six feet, four inches tall; Michele tops off at a mere five-foot-one, even though I insist that she carries herself online as if she had another five or six inches on her. While we are both Italian, she has aligned herself with the forces of unenlightenment in the raging sauce vs. gravy debate (I am Team Sauce). She’s from Long Island (and still lives there) while I am from New Jersey (but live in D.C.). Although the casual observer might not see much of a difference between the two, they might as well be on opposite sides of the globe. And she’s a Yankees fan, which … need I elaborate?

Despite those seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Michele and I have become inseparable (online) friends. We interact all day long about matters mundane and serious, offering support whenever the other needs it. And even though Michele’s writing for the site has slowed to a trickle, she has been on a creative writing rampage of late. We share our work and give each other critiques and encouragement. I’m not even jealous of Michele’s absurdly high ratio of acceptances to rejections. It’s gotten to the point where one of us will ask if everything is all right if we haven’t heard from the other for a few hours. 

After a year of friendship online, pressure is mounting for us to meet in person. My wife, Beth, thinks it should happen, as does my friend Liam (consider this my obligatory mention of him in one of my essays). Michele made some noise about it last month after a successful meetup with another longtime online-only friend. I’m sure it would work out fine, but part of me wonders if the magic will be nowhere in evidence when we find ourselves in each other’s presence. I doubt that will happen, but even if it does, it won’t erase the good times we’ve had since that fateful Sunday night one year ago, when I sent the DM heard round the world. 

But the Doors and the Yankees? What have I gotten myself into?

Jim Parisi lives in Occupied Washington, D.C., with the long-suffering Beth and Dolce, the world’s most adorable boxer-pitbull-Australian cattle dog mix. When not receiving literary rejections, he spends most of his free time coaching Little League softball. In addition to the essays he has written for this website, his writing has appeared in Flash Flood Journal, The Bluebird Word, 50-Word Stories, and The Good Life Review, for which he has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. He has promised Beth that he will be insufferable if either of those nominations turns out to be a victory. She does not disagree.