dudemanflab's Diaryland Diary

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Strange

I have an email folder that I label "old" to make it flexible-- girls I liked, girls who liked me, people I didn't see after '99. Tonight I was reading responses I had from a day long before I wrote on diaryland.

In my emails, I was fond of saying things such as "anywho" and "like" and "Don't Shake a Baby" an awful lot.

And Courtney shirley twice wrote me "I love you" in the summer of 2000, which I never would have remembered otherwise.

Maybe people don't change that much.
Maybe they do.

I tried to imagine myself in a different time. One referenced in a letter. I was at the Holiday Inn, a pink hotel in the middle of town. At Jenna Perez' fifteenth birthday party, a gringo-style quincenera. One of my first dances with the preps. The night I first saw the Electric Slide, the cumbia.

Courtney Shirley wouldn't talk to me. I thought I could live with Courtney the rest of my life. She would hardly look at me in the dancing.

On the balcony, looking down Canal street, Rebecca Schmidtke was drinking pink punch from a clear cup. You could always hear the roaring twenties in her laugh.

I took Jenna Perez for a two-step.
I flagged down Courtney to ask her what was up.
Matt Hollen was still straight.
Blades was still running a rink and arcade.
The Holiday was not called the Carlsbad Inn.

That was a pre-literature Paul,
a pre-poetry Paul, pre-Waterdeep
pre-Molly, pre-musicals, pre-diaryland, pre-allofyou, pre-articulation, pre-college, pre-youtube,
a pre-9-11 Paul,

and I don't usually put much stock in that date as a marker, but I was young and the past looks strange through these glasses.

Great things did not matter as much to me then.

There were always questions, always struggles. Would I get a girlfriend? Would I be able to love her? to kiss her? Could I ever find someone to talk to, who'd understand me? Would I ever catch up to the cultural references dropped all around me?

Maybe those are the one's I remember because those are the one's I still have. Now the sentences have more clauses, longer words. What changed?

I don't remember diets being big, though. Or global warming. or terror. or threats from China. or tax-dollar siphons from Mexico.

I've read books now from that time, though, and all the issues seem to be in the queue.

In my world then, if you wanted something to make you clench your teeth at night, there was the Apocalypse according to Jerry Jenkins and Tim Lahaye. Getting left behind-- now that was a threat.

But I wasn't afraid of my world being disrupted in the sense of bombs or recessions. Each day, I had a thousand moments of dramatic tension. 'Who am I?' quivering on the lip of things.

Course they're no going back to a time of innocence. I have to hang or fold or leave the memories somewhere else for the present, the ongoingly.

I'll own the world has changed,
But I don't have to be afraid.

12:48 a.m. - February 17, 2008

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