Writing early today, as I’m trying to not give free hours to my employer. So, more emptying out the drafts folder.
This is something I wrote during the summer writing period. I quoted what I my first writing bit when I started writing on OD in 1999. So, as you’re seeing too far on social media, How It Started
This was from when I started writing in earnest in 1999.
Aspiring to the Weekly World News – 7/23/1999
Let me bring you up to speed…..
Occupation:
I work full time, and go to college full time. I also spend lots of time on the road, because I’m still living with my parents in BFE.
Family:
Parents are okay….brother is a stoner.
Love life:
Pretty slow through high school….two girlfriends as a freshman, two as a sophomore. I wasn’t looking for anyone as a junior or senior, but a girl kind of shoved her tounge down my throat, and I went along with it. I didn’t leave for college like I planned–we dated until last October. It’s been a really nasty breakup. Since we split, she’s banged two of my friends. She’s now living with one of them…..needless to say, I haven’t spoken to them much. There’s now somebody who I’m sweet on…..I’m not sure if she’s quite figured it out yet. I’m trying to figure out how to proceed. It’s a bit of a weird situation for me, because everything is rather wholesome.
So this would have been roughly five years after I’d sworn off writing. In the high school I attended as a sophomore, during the six-week grading period, (yes, that’s how they did things there…) you could earn an extra credit grade that’d replace the lowest test grade you got in my Honors English class. I think we had to write two entriesS per week over the six-week period. They weren’t anything terribly difficult. I was a fifteen year-old kid locked in “Smruf Village” at Carlisle Barracks. I’d given up on my dream of playing football. The Pennsylvania kids were bigger than I was. I made up for the size difference by being slower. It didn’t work well.
But back to the writing, I was the only kid in my class who tried to ado the extra credit assignment. Naturally, the teacher read everything I wrote.
And was concerned.
I don’t think I wrote anything that was really too far out-of-bounds for a fifteen year-old boy whose body is going nuts in all sorts of ways, but she disagreed. Down to meet with the guidance counselor, who spoke to me, and was less concerned.
This would have been the fall after Kurt Cobain had killed himself, so worry was probably top of mind for high school teaching staffs.
After all that craziness, however, I swore off writing until 1999, when a friend showed me The Open Diary. Though they took a couple years’ hiatus, I’ve not left.
Many of my entries are for my own consumption. I hid many around the time I left radio.
But what’s there is a lot about some of the early days of my relationship with my wife. I’m also seeing things that were probably early MS exacerbations.
So, how’s it going?
I don’t know. You tell me. My writing stretches are a manifestation of Pure O.
Ruminations.
Writing is a strange one, certainly.
That said, it was something I could do without much real screen interaction. When I was in radio, often in the middle of the night, I’d sit back in the darkened studio, close my eyes, and type.
Sometimes it turns out better than other times.
OD was the place I primarily wrote back then.