17 years; my journal is almost as old as I was when I started it. It's amazing that it is still here. There's got to be something to it... what was I keeping in there? Did I know once and forget?

Twelve years... maybe that's long enough to learn something useful about myself.

Part of the reason I left the South is because I never wanted to have another friendship limited by where I grew up, where I was born, or who my grandparents were; I don't hate the players, but that is not a game I want to play anymore. It's a little frustrating to find out that thousands of miles away, there are still people here playing the same ( Read more... )

I'm still a sucker for good house music. Suddenly I'm 18 again and hoping for an escape into a culture of love. I know now that escape is not how a problem is solved, and that love brought on by drugs is not the same as real love, but sometimes when I hear the music... I wish I could just crawl inside the speakers and live there instead.

I'm 30 years old, grown by even the most lenient standards of the word -- yet an 8-year-old bourbon takes me back to 22, struggling to make sense of life. 8 years in an instant; 8 years I spent living, and it spent waiting. Good bourbon can only be an inter-generational gift; one generation paying its dues to those it owed, while creating a debt ( Read more... )

People start to form their own version of what happened almost as soon as it has finished happening. This recollection is often a mixture of truth and not-quite-truths, because certain ugly realities are hard to cope with all at once. Distance from an event sometimes allows one to go back towards it with an eye for truth, but just as often the ( Read more... )

Why do people write memoirs? Because death turns everyone into nerds. Remember the dead through studying their works, and they'll tell you everything that they know. Talented men and women from throughout history will compete for your attention, giving everything they have to avoid the one thing they have no control over -- their memory and legacy ( Read more... )

I've been in Olympia for 5 years; that's longer than my time in North Carolina, longer than my time in Columbia, longer than my time around Charleston, almost... but those years rise up in my memory like beacons, shining bright, almost too painful to look at. I suppose that that's what they mean by "formative years": they didn't take up much, ( Read more... )

I've noticed that in most of my favorite escapist media, time has stopped ( Read more... )

10 years... In hindsight, I'm glad that I started this journal, and regret not writing more frequently as time went on, even if it was the same uncomfotable record on repeat. You never realize how much of life can disappear when there are no photos, no written record, and a spotty and biased memory ( Read more... )