If you’ve been paying attention to me, you’ll recall that I’ve stopped writing for a while to work on my current project, typing up the “weekly” updates I wrote to my friends across the country from 2002 to 2004, and hoo boy is it making me nostalgic. I’m under no illusions, however—I know how utterly miserable I could be at that time in my life, and it really bleeds through onto the updates. Obviously, I was bipolar the whole time and I didn’t know it, so my pattern was a few months of hypo-manic behavior, when I was about what most people would consider normal, if slightly tipsy (i.e. you know how you think, after a drink or two, that you’re particularly charming, funny, good-looking, and the coolest person in the room, even though you’re clearly not?); followed by a deep depression that was on the verge of crippling me. I could see this pattern in the writings I’ve gotten through so far—I’ve been working my way back from the last entry in April, 2004, and I am currently in November, 2002.

I’m finding all kinds of weird, sometimes life-changing adventures I had that I have no memory of, like one I ran into recently about how I went to the apartment of “Prince Nabi II of Persia,” who thought that I was a “beautiful man” but was not hitting on me. I’m also finding adventures that I lived through that I documented fully and in rich detail, such as the one I’ll know as “The Love Pentagram” (ask Barry about that one sometime). I’m also finding moments in my life that I will never forget, like the one where I’m pretty sure I got alcohol poisoning at a Halloween Satanicide concert and passed out on a friend’s couch and coated it in vomit, but I devoted maybe a paragraph to them. This has been quite the ride.

I’m seeing friends whose influence in my life I’d underestimated, and I’m seeing friends who were important to me being unrepresented entirely. There’s one in particular who was a really good friend during that period, and I’m not in touch with him anymore, at all. My attempt to reach out to him has been met with crickets, so I’ll just have to let that go. The other friends I have this unshakable urge to reach out to, and I may get to that, we’ll see. There’s one person I really want to say hi to and tell her how important she still is to me, but I know full well she won’t appreciate that, so I’ll have to let that one go too. This is nostalgia, folks.

What it took a while for me to notice was that, if you’re basing your idea on what you read in these updates, I quit smoking forever in November of 2002 and never looked back, when, in reality, I went right back to smoking by December of that year and kept on until May 2007.

Not to mention the drinking.

Imagine the kind of energy it takes to a commute the better part of an hour, work full day, then have an early dinner and drinks with a visiting friend or relative, then catch a movie (with or without a companion), then go out to drinks with another group of friends, then go to a rock concert in a bar with yet another group of friends, then ride the trains home longer than it took you to get here, and smoke a bunch of marijuana before going to bed. That’s the busy end of my schedule, but that kind of thing happened enough times that I’m exhausted just reading about it. Some weeks, I’d be out five days with people, eating and getting drunk. Add in the six months in 2002 and 2003 that I had a girlfriend, that was another person to spend time with. Seventeen-to-nineteen years was a long time ago. These days, I’m going to a Hall & Oates concert this Saturday, and I’m anticipating spending most of Sunday recovering from being out past my bedtime.

In the end, I have to say that I am extraordinarily grateful that I did these updates. They may have annoyed a lot of people who received them back then, but this was a brief, important part of my life, and I’m getting the chance to relive it. After April 2004, my next journal entry (when I started my Livejournal) was in September 2005, and it wasn’t very consistent after that. I didn’t blog or email about my move to Indiana or my wedding ten months later. I don’t really pick up any sort of regularity again until 2013, when I moved to Qatar, and, even then, I don’t really start doing it frequently until December 2018, and we all know what happened then.

I don’t know if this has inspired me to write more about myself—I’m not a very interesting person anymore—but it’s got me appreciating more what I have written and has encouraged me to relive my live at various eventful points and reminds me that I have lived a very exciting life. It’s dull now, but it doesn’t have to me. Maybe I’ll start looking it through that lens that I was wearing almost twenty years ago. Yeah …

I can go for that. (Getting worked up about tomorrow.)