Sixteen: The Ancients

So, listen.

I just finished writing the post below, and I though about just adding onto it with an edit, but I wanted to use this title above because, well, I just did - title-logic on this thing has been fuzzy since the beginning.

In fact, that's what I wanted to talk about, the beginning. This blog first began just over fifteen years ago. Just after writing that, that I was not naturally feeling nostalgic, I decided to make myself nostalgic by re-reading a very early portion of the blog, around Grade 12.

It was remarkable how "me" it all was. Young me, to be sure - some of my opinions and observations have not been fully informed by the experiences I have had since. Some of my turns of phrase are clunky but my penchant for bad references and complicated wordfuckery totally exists. The cadence of it is all still me, which is pretty impressive, if you look at it from the perspective of a 17-year-old writing nearly as well as an adult would -- and terrible if you look at it from the perspective of a 32-year-old not really getting past where he was at 17.

Now as luck would have it, I am past a lot of it. In those days a lot of what I had to say came from the boredom and sadness of being young and directionless. Ha-Ha! But now I have the boredom and sadness of being an adult! Back then a lot of what I wrote about was overly enthusiastic about minor positivities that occurred to me. A girl looked at me! Someone said a nice thing! That, in addition to life being a drag when you were a 17-year-old in the pre-smartphone days of 2004, I was a particularly awkward and underdeveloped person (all while I drag the younger crop of Reach kids for letting their jaws drop when girls joined the team.)

Something has been lost in the decade and a half since then. I was totally unembarrassed to just let all my shit out on the internet for, if I was lucky, absolutely nobody. (Remember when two girls from your class found the blog and never let you hear the end of it?) Now I am very guarded. There's a lot of "We did this, we did that, things are hard, life is whatever." I don't vent as thoroughly here. I also have twitter to make sassy remarks, bad jokes and observations - I recently had a tweet about Kubla Khan that got a whopping 46 likes and three retweets, which puts it in my hall of fame for sure. (Wow, as time goes by I have not grown less thirsty.)

It's probably for the best I am not still blogging the same as I used to do when I was a 17-year-old weirdo. Like, that's a sign of growth, and I wonder if it's a problem that I don't write differently enough. But I think it's fine.

My main point - and I absolutely do not have a point but let's pretend this is a point - is that you can never quarantine the past, in the words of Stephen Malkmus. All that shit happened and I thought it and it's on the record and this 32-year-old man is keeping continuity with his 17-year-old self for whatever reason, completeness, consistency, lack of anything new. I could tear it all down and rebuild my brand elsewhere, as I have occasionally done, but for what? SWP would creep back to me. I am this blog.

Maybe on purpose.

I wouldn't say I have more baggage than any average person and maybe less than most. And maybe that's because I have itemized it so well.

So the point I find myself arriving at is this:

I wish I wrote more here and that it wasn't like just-barely-catching-up every time I checked in. But scratch that because what I also wish is that the writing I did here was something I felt was appropriate to share with the world again. It was sort of the hope behind BLTN, but that didn't come to pass (and everything I write there has to  e to Content standards) and now I write less there than I do here- but I will link to there on FB but not here. But I will stay faithful to this blog because it means something to me. Embarrassingly, wretchedly personal as it is. I wish then, that BLTN was this blog, but to where I had more filter over the content, not to where I was super guarded but to where I wasn't embarrassing myself.

Hm, hm, hm.

Something to work toward, I think. But I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever have the kind of time I want for that shit. To sit and bitch to the internet all night every night like when I was 17? But also make it good and funny like I might possibly at 32? While my future-wife is right there expecting to be my main audience and looking for my attention? Nuh-uh.

Tweets are all you get, I guess.

This all really didn't have a point, but it was better than nothing.

Mel naps. When we got here she was thrilled to see a puzzle laid out that we could work on (Lori even invited us to do so) but Mel was aghast at the lack of piece-sorting they had done. So we sorted, and placed a bunch of pieces, it was nice. Also we made friends with a caterpillar and laid together on the dock.

I have to work on dinner soon so that it gets done before the sun goes down. Getting peckish sine we had a late breakfast and no lunch.

Keep on rockin, again
-Scotto