May 30, 2025
Since I created the DOS Mode style sheet I've been doing an archive binge to make sure I didn't miss anything in the conversion. It's been interesting (and more than a little cringey) to read what I wrote back in the '00s.
I wrote more back then -- I even had a buffer at one point! Nowadays I'm trying and failing to write once a month. And there's that decade I didn't write much of anything at all that I'm not going to mention. Not everything was particularly interesting, but I was trying to get some practice at writing so maybe the quantity had a quality all its own.
What do I see looking back? Like I said, mostly a good helping of Cringe. There are more than a few posts that would fit into the "incel" category if that term had been coined at the time, and I was just an immature little snot in general. And wow, I was angry. At my job at Brady, at other drivers, at clients, you name it. It's honestly weird to me: I don't look back at my time at Brady with nostalgia, but everything else? I must have been insufferable back then.
There are positives: The posts I put up when I first got the Jetta reminded me how much I liked that car. It's been more than eight years now since someone decided the correct place to stop for a red light was in my trunk. While I like the Volt too (mostly) the Jetta was just more fun.
I have one regret that eclipses the others, including my dipshittery from twenty years ago. There's so much that I wish I'd written. I've always had the (metaphorical) goldfish memory, and I know there have been a ton of things over the years that are just... gone now. Seeing the old posts really drove that home. For just a few minutes those days, good and bad, came back in a way they hadn't for years. And then I stopped writing. What's lurking beneath the surface never to come back up again because I don't have something there to jog my memory? What am I denying myself for all those years of laziness and forgetfulness?
The thought went through my head a little bit ago that I'd rather regret things I've done than things I didn't do, and that applies to this blog as well. I'll take the stupidity and the latent embarrassment over a blank decade any day of the week. Which means there might be some back-in-the-day posts in the future as something bubbles up and I record it before it returns to the depths. Even if it's bad, so I can see it again in the future and let me revisit myself from those times some more. Past Me might have been an unlikeable shithead, but he can still remind Present Me of a thing or two. Maybe even provide guidance, albeit probably in a "let's not do that again" sort of way.
So, stay tuned. Maybe this space will start catching updates again. Or maybe I'll go back to my old ways. Present Me has that in common with Past Me, after all.
