by VeryCuddlyCornpone on Thu May 24, 2012 5:30 pm
Crossposting this message from another forum, it's the same story so it don't matter none.
I got this spontaneous urge to read this terrible, several hundred page long anthology I wrote starting when I was 13. It's absolutely abysmal but I want to keep reading it. There's things I've forgotten about but then come right back in a snap as soon as I read them. Characters who were introduced once and never again, but I still picture them clear in my head. Over the ~50 pages I've read so far, there has been a teaspoon's worth of actual funny material that could be used outside of this context.
But I'm not reading it to dig for gold. I just had a craving to revisit that time in my life, which was disproportionately well-documented. I kept diaries at the time but this story contains mostly the same material and is a lot less depressing. It's no gem, I had this bad habit of including millions of unimportant details that had no relevance or humor to add, but in a strange way it's really representative of my life at that time. It's fascinating to me. Sometimes I forget I ever was 13 or 14 years old, or forget just how "old" a person feels at that age. I look at kids that age now and just see them as that, as kids, but the seeds of adult mentality have been planted. This story is pedantic and terrible and reminds me of what a horrible person I was at that age, but it's oddly comforting to me. Both in a "look how far I've come" way and a "I guess things will work out okay" way.
It helps that it's a slice-of-life high school drama type story and I kept putting references to popular songs and brand names of the time. It's bizarre to think that these things are no longer relevant, that nearly a decade has passed. Things and lifestyles I'd long forgotten about-remember life before Facebook and iPods?- but somehow seem so accessible still, if I wander down the memory path a little bit.
Good god, I want to just devour this thing whole, just shove the whole thing right away and then filter it through my baleen bristles and savor what remains of quality. I want to be done reading it because it's so terrible, but I'm relishing it because the nostalgia is so pure, like finest maple syrup, just a taste of it brings back such strong memories and feelings. My aspirations from the time, my thought processes, the things I held dear and the things I should have cared more about.
Don't kid yourself, friend. I still know how.