The not-so-secret history: 1990

I have no idea what prompted me to take down the stack of diaries I used to keep on and off from ages 13-24 - back when writing down my thoughts and observations in private apparently seemed like a meaningful and worthwhile activity.

Naturally, my first response to any of these most ineloquent (or worse: self-consciously eloquent) musings is a long bout of involuntary cringeing, followed by acute shame and, of course, a relapse of chronic cynicism. But there was a reason I kept diaries: they were not just an effective pressure valve for my spiritual miasma, but the product of an uncanny and proleptic certainty that, one day, they would prove useful.

That day is here, maybe.

As I continue to age, I find it frustrating that I can't recall what are obviously unmemorable but undoubtedly vivid details of my earlier, funnier, happier life experiences. And without a modestly legible record, how would I know what I did after work on July 20, 1990? (while living in San Francisco with a very good friend):

Yesterday - cemetery closed
bought flowers anyway
went to beach
called Steve
Irish coffee
Camera Obscura reserved privately
sunset
another Chinese food
dreams about phallus

Or, what I was thinking about on August 8, 1990? (while driving across the country):

Through Nashville today, Bush sent troops to Persian Gulf. ... For some reason, I always feel so self-conscious eating alone in fast-food restaurants. There was a sensitive fat kid at Arby's complaining about sweeping the carpet, lamenting over the Persian Gulf-Iraq crisis; he knows all about it: "I'll grab a gun and head for the hills. I'm 18," and, to another co-worker, "You forgot - I'm a geek. I don't go anywhere." But he'd rather be doing almost anything else than sweeping the carpet, I'm sure.

Or how confused I was about life, the power of inscrutable abstraction, and all I thought these promised back on October 12, 1990? (while still an idealistic college student):

Today I have been considering my future. Not just acknowledging it, or trying to invoke it, as usual, but I have really understood today that it is going to happen, and I'd better be ready for it when it does. ... When the future indicates itself in very real ways, I feel both electrified and embarrassed. There is something about being face to face with what you know will happen, or at least some sign of it, that forces you to decide who you are, to stand up for that decision, to face people as "who you are." That is embarrassing, that closeness, the intimacy of that assertion. ... There is no such thing as failure or error at that point. There are just facts, of which you are evidence somehow. It is terrifying to be right, to be "the facts." Failure is so demoralizing and so comfortable, and so much easier.

And without this cryptic, undated entry, how else would I be reminded that even at a tender age, I clearly understood the fundamentals of my survival?:

Send pills
3rd class
parcel post
by tues.