Reflections on the past

I stumbled across an old journal I kept when I was a teenager, back when I was actually doing that for a year or so. This was also one of several years when I fell into the stereotype of the poetry-writing angst-ridden teenager, further exacerbated by the cultural climate of the early 1990s. The entry just happened to be sometime in the summer of 1993. I didn't really pay attention to an exact date. I just read as much as I could stand, and honestly, it wasn't much. I noticed some consistent themes, specifically self-loathing, an excessively immaturely pompous writing style, and a tendency towards excessive verbosity.

Given the fact that Christian Slater was my hero (namely, his roles in "Pump Up the Volume" and "Heathers"), the fact that I listened to Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, and others as they expressed (and possibly fed) my inner anguish, as well as other issues in play at the time, the first wasn't exactly unexpected. I won't go into detail, but I will say that, as I've learned from some of the people I'm close to, some heartbreaks hurt just as much when you've reached middle age as they do when you're in your teens. I would like to think, however, that I would handle it a lot better now than I did back then, were it to recur. I'm certainly at a much happier point in my life now than I was then, though I now have some anxiety problems that did not exist back then, or perhaps were being masked by the other aspects of my inner turmoil. All in all, I say it's a more than fair trade.

On the second count, the most that I can say is that, while I do have tendencies to lean towards pomposity when provoked, at least I'm a lot more mature about it, and again, that aspect of self-loathing isn't there to make those displays virtually unreadable.

On the third count, however, as the host of Various Miseries, and to a far lesser extent, the hosts of Petty Rage, will attest, there's been no real change on that front. But at least my writing style has improved significantly, although I still have a bad case of diarrhea of the keyboard. I guess it's easier for me to say less at Perverted Republican's website since she doesn't spend all that much time talking about policy issues and party politics, focusing more on the first word in her name than the second. But one thing I will say is that at least she's interesting, even if her site isn't exactly appropriate for someone under the age of 18.

Perhaps this post is little more than self-indulgent whimsy, but that's pretty much the nature of most of blogspace, at least, what I've seen of it in my short time as a blogger.