Sometime during my senior year of high schoo, I decided that I wanted to bea writer. That’s com ewith its problems and roadblocks over the years, many of which are self-inflicted, but I was a determined teenager with enough of an ego to believe that my voice was going to be the next big thing.

Okay, I don’t think I was that pompous, but I certainly had a lot to say and was cosntantly looking for avenues to say it.

I’ve got down thoe roads before on this blog; specifically, I looked at the column I had in The Greyhound. I’ve also got stories, poems, and essays that I wrote for the classes I was taking. They were a bit better than what I had been writing in high school, but I had an inferiority complex in those classes, which was tht I was coming into college with very little life experience beyond being a sheltered kid who liked comics and movies. Everyone else seemed to be able to pull from trauma–divorce, addiction, eating disorders–or had more “mature” experiences (or were straight-up cooler than I was).

That’s not to belittle anone who pulls fom their pain in order to write, because some beautiful things often come from that. I was just so inexperienced and it made me insecure and jealous. It also made me feel like a joke. That’s hard for someone who doesn’t take criticism well.

There are four years of college contained in those two notebooks, and the entries are sporadic. I chalk this up to the weight of the college schedule and not having a lot of time for pursuits outside of the classes and homework that were my obligations (you know, kind of how like you don’t read a lot for fun when you’re an English major because you are reading 3-4 books at a time for class). So since I never really used my creative writing journals for class, they’re a bit misleading when it comes to my creative output in the late 1990s.

There certainly wasn’t anything saving in them, and whereas the journals from my senior year of high school were delightfully cringey, these were straight-up embarrassing.

The covers both have quotes (and this would eventually stop): one from the Tori Amos song “Pretty Good Year” and the other from … Don Henley? I tend to fall down pop music rabbit holes that ar ecompletely opposite of whatever my friends are listening to and what’s trendy. I guess “The Last Worthless Evening” was one of those. The back covers featured a Dookie-era Green Day stiker and what my friend’s brother once referred to as “The Most Obnoxious Bumper Sticker on Long Island”: “Montauk — The End.” It was kind of the 1990s Long Island equivalent of all of those OBX stickers I see on every other pickup aroun dhere. So yeah, he was kind of right.

What about what’s in the journals?

Well, of course, there is more shitty love poetry. My relationship ended between my freshman and sophomore years and its death was slow. Without getting too much into it, it’s clear that I was masking its problems with shmoopiness. I’ve wanted to punch myself for that many times.

There’s also a whole bunch of me writing stories that were based on me and my friends. I have to wonder if there is a psychological term for this. Main character syndrome? But I always thought of myself (and sometimes still do) as a side or supporting character. I’d actually write a lot of fiction that never went anywhere. All these years later, I can see it as both writing exercises or working something out. Maybe I simply wanted to be cooler than I was or have a life more interesting than I did.

And while that is pretty much the both notebooks, three other things stood out to me as I flipped through the pages. First was a list of codes for all of the clip art in an old desktop publishing platform called Arts & Letters. I was introduced to the program in my ninth grade computer graphic class; it was basically an early Nineties version of Broderbund’s Print Shop program (you know, the ones you used to print dot-matrix banners on your Commodore 64). Mr. Taber (husband to my creative writing teacher) taught us how to make logos, signs, and even templates for packaging (like a pack of trading cards) using the fonts, clip art, and word art. It, along with an early version of PageMaker, were my first forays into graphic design and more than likely fueled my ten years as a high school yearbook adviser.

Anyway, my friend had copied the program–which was many, many floppy disks–from the high school computers (I wouldn’t surprised if he was allowed to do it or the teachers at least looked the other way) and when I got a computer of my own, he lent me all the disks to load it on there. The clip art list was one I compiled over hours of inserting graphics onto a page and then writing down ther numbers. I know if I even used the clip art, but I do know that I used Arts & Letters to create a template for mix tape labels.

Next is more poetry but by other people, printed out and taped into the book. This was 1995-1998, so we are talking really early Internet where websites were sparse and people would just put whatever up there using whatever ability they had in a chaos of formats. These types of poems would eventually find their way onto livejournal and tumblr decades later. I’m not sure what the source is for “Coffee Stains From Hell” and Googling it turns up nothing; it’s a piece of early Internet ephemera.

Finally, there is a “good” poem I wrote called “1:43 a.m. Diner Napkin Conversation”, which I wrote … on a napkin. And I was the type of lameoid who would write a draft of a poem about a diner napkin on a napkin on purpose.

But this was one that I actually used in my sophomore year creative writing poetry class and after workshopping it, came up with this:

1:43 a.m.
(Conversation on a Diner Napkin)

Rain falls to the sidewalk
beside a lonely crowded roadside diner,
where I’m wondering what it was about her
that could have stopped the world for so long.

The exact handwriting, shape of numbers–
lines a paper napkin
with her phone number
in faded gray pencil and that smudge
always a backdrop for conversation.

And smiling.

I remember smiling
and she did the same
even though the music stopped
and the words were erased
by the rain ticking off my umbrella
into the night.

So not everything in the notebooks are embarrassing.

The college years journal ends in 1998 and doesn’t pick up until 2000. I am either missing a notebook or simply didn’t keep one during 1999, although I know that I was definitely writing throughout that year. And like I said, I feel a lot of legitimate embarrassment over what’s in here, but I guess if you say you were fully formed even in college, you are definitely lying to yourself or someone else.