You're tellin' me this guy wasn't born to write for Melrose Place?

Whoever you are reading this blog, I don’t know you. Well, maybe I do know you, but whether I know you or I don’t, I bet that you knew someone like Jon Caren during your adolescent days. Let me tell you a few things about Jon Caren. Life in the relatively upper-middle class hamlet of southwest Beverly Hills was cruising along pretty steadily until one day in 1991 when all of a sudden the powers that be got together and decided who was cool, who was popular, and who the girls liked. It may have been fate, it may have been luck, or it may have been the fact that he went through puberty abnormally early, but the guy who got annointed was Jon Caren. All of a sudden his charisma began filling the halls of Beverly Vista Elementary School and it just worked.

You know how cool Jon Caren was? He’d do stupid shit just to do it and see how many people would imitate him. And they did. One day,  the fucking guy decided to stick a neon bandaid on his shoe. Do you know how many kids came to school the next day with neon bandaids on their shoes? Do you? Now you’ve got to remember, this was the early 90’s. Acting like you stepped out of the Dre Day video and trying to be thug was valued at a premium. If you wanted to be at the top of a social pecking order, you most likely had to embrace inner city African-American culture like your name was The Honorable Elijah Mohammed. But Jon didn’t. He kept his pants only relatively baggy and pledged allegiance to the feel-good hip-hop of Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul at the expense of gangsta rap. In a nutshell the guy brought character and integrity to teenage shallowness and absurdity (I mean, not really, but kind of).

As anyone who experienced the electric vibe emanating from the 500 block of North Alpine could attest to, this kept going pretty much through the last episode of Cheers and past the OJ Simpson trial. Then one day…all of a sudden…out of the blue…. the guy quit the football and basketball teams, rejected most of his inner circle of friends and instead  joined the drama club, the dance team, and bought a Volkswagen Passat. It was a reinvention worthy of Madonna (or to a lesser extent, Mario Lopez). But you want to know something? It still worked. People even jocked the Passat! Who the hell else can drive a Passat and make it cool???!!!!! You’ve got to be kidding me!!!

Anyways, long story short, the luster eventually wore off as the guy camped out at a liberal arts college (from which I am technically banned from for life, but that’s another story) and spent the next 7 years grinding it out as an up and coming writer and closet Silver-Laker. Well now Jon Caren has popped his head back up as a vital contributor to another 90’s classic: Melrose Place. Jon recently staffed up on the show and is the credited writer of Tuesdays episode. This episode just so happens to harken the return of another 90’s treasure, Daphne Zuniga. No wonder they put this fragile episode in Jon Caren’s hands. I mean, if you can’t trust a guy who wears neon band-aids on his shoes, who can you trust?

Watch! This Tuesday! Or else I’ll roll you up in a blanket and throw you off a bridge.