The box had been sitting in my office closet for years. And even years before that, it was in our previous house and apartments. Like a number of other things, it just moved with me and was forgotten. But unlike the piles of senior year mementos and old letters and cards that I found easy to give up, this was a little tougher because it held 30 years of my writing.

I’ve always liked writing stories. I remember writing one in the second grade that my teacher liked (I don’t know what it was about but I do remember a character named George). As a kid, i would make up plots for action movie starring my friends and made attempts at writing short stories, banging them out on a Smith Corona typewriter. But it wasn’t until my senior year of high school where I flet like I could make a serious attempt at writing, and it’s all Mrs. Taber’s fault.

Okay, maybe it’s not completely her fault because I voluntarily signed up for her creative writing class as my fall eelctive. I’d had her for English when I was a sophomore and while I struggled at times (I still loathe plot tests for novels), I wrote well and she wound up being one of my favorite teachers in high school. Even if I hadn’t taken creative writing, I would have probably asked her to critique my college essay anyway. But creativing writing class it was and it did change my life.

That does sound dramatic, doesn’t it. Sorry.

It’s kind of true? Because when I took that class, I disocvered that I really had some ability to write. It also happens to be where the first of those 30 years’ worth of notebooks begins. I’ve decided to get rid of them, but not before I take one last look at what is in there, and the first two of them proved to be really interesting because they were the actual notebooks for that class and the rest of my senior year, starting in September 1994 and ending in August 1995, which was about a week before I headed off to school in Baltimore.

The front and back covers of my journals these days are nondescript. My name is in the top left corner, “Creative Writing Journal” is in the center, and the date started and ended are below that. These two have a little more to them and kind of crack me up. I had been trying so hard to be the “clever one” when I was 17, so quoting Dante in a tongue-in-cheek manner and also writing “The harder you play, the louder it gets”, which I found on the back of a Coed Naked Rock and Roll T-shirt (I didn’t own that one, but I did have hockey and billiards coed naked T-shirts). And the back of the notebooks have a collage ofmagazine ads cut from an issue of Sports Illustrated to create some sort of saying (maybe it’s poetry these days? Who knows) as well as a Superman #100 image cut from an issue of Previews. The front cover of Journal II was less cheeky–simply a quote from my friend Vanessa about dorkiness. if you have followed me since I started Pop Culture Affidavit, you’ll know that this is a mantra of mine.

Now, there’s a good portion of these two notebooks that is unremarkable, and I’m not just saying that in a self-depricating or humblebrag sor tof way. Mrs. Taber had required entires and exercises, so there are quite a bit of those, along with quotes that I would collect and Far Side cartoons. When I branched out to “do my own thing” beyond the journals, that’s where it gets interesting. Mrs. Taber would read every entry and leave comments and Post-Its. Reading them thirty years later (and she has since passed on) made me laugh because it was like we were having a bit of a conversation. Plus, she didn’t pull punches and to this day, I appreciate her candor.

When it comes to my writing at the time, you can break these journasl into nonfiction prose (essays, commentaries, observations), fiction, and poetry. Most of the nonfiction is scattered paragraphs where I bitch as if I’m Holden Caulfiend or something–I was clearly going through a phase–and it would be until my freshman year of college where I would find my essay voice. But the fiction and poetry and prominent.

I’ve recently gotten back into writing fiction; in fact, I have picked up characters that I created in these very notebooks via a story that I wrote and had published in our high school literary magazine, “Scenes from a High School Prom” (yes, I went with a Billy Joel reference). It’s about four friends go to … well, the prom. One of the guys, Jim, has a crush on his next-door neighbor and date, Cindy. The other two–a girl named Danielle and a guy named “Pan-Pan” (a cringey self-insert) are their sidekicks all night and eventually take bets as to whether or not they two fo them are going to kiss. Of course, it ends with a kiss.

It’s a very Eighties teen movie or TV show plot (it could be a Saved By the Bell episode), but that’s no surprise considering how many Eighties moveis I was watching on a regular basis. The story also has some … cinematic features? I remember being really proud of (and yeah, I still am) the way I had two conversations between the two pairs of characters occuring simultaneously and would cut back and forth between them by having one conversation finish the other’s sentences.

That story would be the centerpiece of a novel and those characeters would appear int wo others as well as sets of stories that take place berfore that prom. Don’t bother looking for them. They aren’t anywhere but my hard drive. But I will say that danielle was the “thru-line” character for all of it and I recently started drafting a novel where one of the main characters is her college-aged daughter. I’ve also got a short story about those four characters in their late thirties meeting up at a diner. It’s currently in draft.

The other big piece of fiction that’s in these notebooks involves my girlfriend at the time. We’d met in that class and would eventually start dating. I remembered that kate and I had written a story together, but had forgotten that it started with the two of us having a back adn forth in my notebook. I found the story on my hard drive in a folder labeled “Sayville 1995-1996.” It’s called “With Friends Like These” and the plot is well, basically the two of us as main characters in a romantic comedy-type of plot where they kind of snipe at one another and then fall for one another. The idea is kind of cute, but the execution of it is really cringeworthy; I couldn’t get past the second page.

But none of that is as cringeworthy as my poetry.

I don’t know where to start with the poetry I wrote in high school, except to say that I half-joke to my AP students that I have set the bar incredibly low for them. Really, though, Mrs. Taber had impeccible timing to teach us the finer points of poetry in November because that’s when I went out with and then got dumped by a girl within the span of … two weeks. But because I was annoyingly emotional about everything this was the first girl I’d ever actually gone out with, it turned into a saga. With terrible poetry for its soundtrack.

Mrs. Taber had shared with us the poetry of Peter McWilliams, who in addition to writing self-help books, and being an activist for the legalization of marijuana, wrote a few volumes of poetry. It’s free verse and very simple; in some cases, he shaped the poetry. For a high school student whose only attempts at poetry had been really bad rhymes and acrostics and never considered free verse an option, this was a revelation. These journals are filled with pages and pages of syrupy poetry as well as terrible bitter breakup poems.

You can see one of those attempts to write a poem whose shape communicated the point alongside the words. Swan diving into love? Yikes. The one on the left is a little bit better, I guess. I like the phrase “We just sort of happened” written in a scattered sort of way. And I wrote another one called “Rational” that was the breakup equivalent of this where the last line was “That was my first mistake.” Again … two weeks.

There’s a lot of stuff, both happy and sad, but the centerpiece of all of it is “Porcelain,” otherwise known as “The Vomit Poem.”

In the course of my anger and the need to turn in creative writing assignments, I wrote this pissed off breakup poem where I compared going out with my then ex-girlfriend to the act of vomiting. “Green and orange chunks”, “Toilet paper tainted with residue.” I mean, you see it. It’s brutal, and I have no idea why Mrs. Taber gave me an A in the class. Maybe she felt sorry for me?

The girl in that poem–she of two weeks–is my friend Cathy and when we finally reconciled about halfway through the first semester of my freshman year of college (a long drawn-out drama that doesn’t need rehashing), she actually requested that I print out all of that poetry and give her a copy. It’s been 30 years and I doubt she still has it. As for Kate, she hated that poem and gave me the ashes of a copy of “Porcelain” in a Ziploc bag. I actually found that funny.

“Porcelain” has a legacy beyond that, however. A few years into my teaching career, I decided to do a brief unit on poetry with my sophomores. I told them what I still tell my students: you can’t possibly write a poem any worse than the ones I did in high school. When pressed, I told them about this one. Naturally, they wanted to hear it. And being only a few years into my career and still interested in trying to make my students like me, I brought it in on our “read our your poems” day. I think I even reserved the auditorium stage for it so that we had a change of scenery. Anyway, when it came to me, I started the poem off trying to match its serious, heartbroken tone. But the class started to giggle and then I started to chuckle and by the end of the poem, I was completely breaking and realized it was one of the most hilarious things ever written.

I struggle sometimes with past embarrassments. In recent years, my brain has often had fun with them, bringing up embarrassments or wrongdoings at any random opportunity, as if someone out there is keeping score of all of it. Going back trhough these made me a little anxious. But this was cathartic and more fun than I thought it would be. And I’m curious as to what the notebooks from college hold.