Anyone else read old threads here and get sad?

I was just looking at an old thread here, from 2008—11 years ago!—and it made me all kinds of sad. I feel like fucking Holden Caulfield. I couldn't help thinking about who we've lost since then, and how much life and the world has changed. I was married then, with a two-year-old and a new baby. Now I'm divorced with a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old. I have a different job, and a different house. I'm the same person in some ways but also kind of busted-up in other ways. Maybe I'm better in a few small ways, and my life is mostly very good, but still... Reading who we all were back then, and who isn't here anymore, it honestly kind of choked me up a little. It was like going back in time for a second and seeing you and your friends as younger and more hopeful, like Richard Dreyfuss writing those last few sentences at the end of Stand By Me.

I'm wondering if I'm losing my mind.

 

Not losing your mind, but most likely having a midlife crisis. You’re not alone. I’m not looking to bang twentysomethings or buy a motorcycle or a sports car. But more and more I think of where I am age wise relative to my father back in the day and it helps light a fire under my ass.

I have certain life goals I must achieve for the sake of my piece of mind, and one is finishing this novel I’m working on. Just started second draft yesterday so I imagine going into hibernation for a spell. It’s not about its succsss, though that would be great. It’s that I might be holding the one good to great idea for a creative endeavor that I will ever have in my life and I can’t waste it. But I’m my own worst enemy and lean toward self destruction so it’s possible it won’t ever come off.

I always wanted to have my first novel published by the age of 35, same as Kerouac was when On the was pubbed. That was 11 years ago.

Thanks, now I’m fucking hating myself.

 

Sorry, buddy. I really, really hope you write your novel, it gets published, and I get to read it one day.

 

On the other hand, Kerouac had drank himself to death by 47, living in suburban Florida. With his mother.

So, wherever you are right now, you're way ahead of that particular game.

 

I'll be 47 next year, so I still got time...

 

I don't really look at old threads here except to try to find something that was particularly amusing. As Moddy said, people here come and go.

I do occasionally think about the event that brought me here, which was a particularly frustrating point in my journalism career. Given that it sent me on a path to an entirely different career which has been better for me in every possible way, no matter how angry I was at the time, it has been nothing but good.

I am actually celebrating a significant milestone in my new career tonight, so no, definitely not sad at all.

 

Well don't leave us guessing. How many johns are you up to?

 

CD's got some very disturbing fantasies about me.