November 12, 2010 - Breakfast

I now have all of my email in one place, searchable by word. I feel that if I'm going to return to writing the least I can do for my audience is to re-read everything I've written, and cross-reference it with emails and other correspondence, as an aid to memory so that I don't repeat myself or tread over old ground. I don't know how the memories of other people work, but I assume I'm typical: I remember facts, sensations, people, events, but when it comes to myself I come up blank. Sort of like in 360° views in web maps--you can see everything but the camera. Yanking up any piece from my blog, or any email from the last 15 years, I can see the camera.

So far I've learned:

• The post-college years of 21-24 were wistful and goofy. I was essentially a zinester--all I ever wanted before the Internet was to do mail art and photocopy zines--and took that as my model.

• The years between 25 until I got serious with [now-Wife] were spent in a weird kind of chaos driven by a desperate need for validation, both from women and from an audience, and from employers. Those years are mostly blanked out in my memory, but many of the sentiments were of the "I'm 27 and I'm not yet rich!" variety. This has given me some sympathy for the similarly impossible young egos I sometimes come across. Not many friendships and relationships remain from that era. Reading emails, there was less there there than there should have been.

• In some ways the job at Magazine Magazine was a blessing, in that I went there for validation and left having received a lesson to prize above all others. Namely: Don't take a job in a viper pit for the health insurance.

The Paul-camera was busy capturing everything it could, but it always managed to avert its gaze when I took the the half-block trek from my tiny room to the bodega for lemon-frosted and cheese-sprayed, things, for buttered bagels and potato chips, and for enough Diet Coke to fill a giraffe's bathtub. Esophagus, eternally congested with pasty muffins. The smile of the Yemeni clerks at the fellow they once called "their best customer." I had to go to a different bodega for the following week, so humiliating was that urgency.

That said, re-reading myself there aren't many outright surprises. Just moments of humility, when despite all the pseudoliterary bluster the curtain parts to reveal the chubby guy behind the curtain, typing with his 3X shirt untucked.

The lesson being not that I should have been ashamed, but rather that this was actually an okay activity for the chubby guy--that while the other stuff was all fantasy, the work was real, remains real, was worthwhile, and all the time I kept insisting I deserved better, while feeling assured I didn't, not really--that was fine. There is nothing wrong with wanting.

And... whatever. If you asked me now I'd tell you that what you're reading was a fairly complete representation of self but I'm sure I'll be back a decade later, slowly shaking my head.

Weight: 312.5 lbs