Wasted Youth

_____Was rummaging through my stored belongings today in search of a cherished t-shirt (no dice!) and stumbled upon a keepsake box from my college years. I kept journals in those days and started leafing through a few them for a quick jog down memory lane. Wow, I know I'm a total nut job now, but back then, my days would probably have been better spent locked up in a rubber room.

_____Most of the content is just insecure babbling by a clueless college kid who imposed drama on the most pedestrian of events. If I knew someone today that was as insecure as I was back then, she would utterly annoy me. A goodly portion of one journal is dedicated to my deep-set obsession with a summer fling. I now cringe at the crazy dribble I wrote in there about this guy. Hormones are pretty effective at overpowering common sense. I had to skip through much of that recorded saga, it was so embarrassing. Ay yi yi. I'm vacillating between keeping the journals for posterity or using them for kindling. Maybe a nice compromise is an abridged version with all the prurient passages and accounts of reckless mischief blacked out a la top secret government files. Hmmmm...there might not be much left to read after that.

_____I also found various loose paper scraps with poems I had written, some somber and dark, but many just plain nonsensical. Talk about issues. I had some pent-up aggression back then. In fact, one of the sheets had the word "AGGRESSION" violently scribbled on the back. Cuckooooooo. But reading those diaries made me appreciate just how much I have evolved since my twenties. I seem to have gone from "cynical idealist" to "optimistic realist," and traveled the full spectrum in between. Where to now? I love not knowing.