I was 25.
This was before blogs and after journals. But the internet and email had been around for a while.
Moving here, I left behind many, many good friends. Most of them wanted to move out of Ky, too. And I guess as a way for them to live that experience without having to leave, many of them asked me to send emails about my progress.
I swear to you, they asked me to do it. Honest.
I've always written long emails. And, well, long everythings, really. I'm the guy who runs out of time on people's voicemail recordings. I just want to get everything said as clearly as possible. Sometimes that takes time.
Maybe that explains why these are so long.
These are the emails that I sent home to friends and family, updating them to what my life was like, here in Chicago. As weird luck would have it, one of my good friends, Ed Conkle saved the emails in some long lost email acct. When he discovered them again, a few months ago, he forwarded them to me, for a laugh. He suggested that I should post them on my current blog. And that sounded like a fun idea, until I actually read the things and was embarrased by how I wrote back then.
I thought a separate blog might be a better way to share them, without having to look at them all the time, myself.
So, I created this "tangential blog" to archive these emails.
This is who I was and how I wrote to people when I was 25, living in Chicago for the first year and a half.
I've included them here, in their entirety. Warts and all. I've resisted the urge to edit the 25 year old me. To tone down the florid language and the overly-complicated sentence structures.
Some quick last thoughts...
-This also quickly touches on Sept. 11., 2001. But at the time that it happened, I was so stunned (we all were) that I couldn't really write about it. I got emails from people asking me to write something, anything, to make some sense of what had happened to us and what it all meant. That was flattering, but I politely declined the requests. The truth was, it was too big for me to figure out. So, I just left it un-commented upon.
This last year, I wrote in my new blog, "word" about how I actually experienced that day. You can read that entry, "My 911 Memories" by clicking here. If that sort of thing interests you.
-One more thing... For this to make any sense at all, you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and work your way upwards. They posts are actually dated and time-stamped to when I actually sent the emails out. I think that they would make more sense, if you read them in order.
Maybe.
In closing, I would ask that you forgive the earlier model of me for his vanity and just take a look at what he was trying to say and not how he was stuck saying it. We were all young once. We all sounded like doofus' once. This is what I sounded like, when I was a 25 year old doofus.
Good Luck.
Mr.B
My First Headshot. Taken in 2000.
This is what I looked like, back then.
