Shredding the Folly of Youth
One thing that sets this site apart from just about every other vehicle used to convey or carry my thoughts and musings is that it’s not easily ripped up, burned or buried due to the fact that it has an audience. Destruction was the usual fate of 99% of what I wrote from childhood through college. I’m sure that’s mostly a good thing, except for when Sarah Brown has kindly invited me back to Cringe and I really, really want to bring more of the embarrassing kindling I remember writing.
My first writing, as a young child, was angry writing. I first wrote to kill time while waiting for people. I wrote because I couldn’t draw, because my unicorns and pegasuses looked funny and my trees were boring.
I was raised to always be on time, because a person who is late clearly does not care about you, is a selfish, insensitive, poorly-organized person apparently not worth being friends (or sharing DNA?) with. And so I made a point to always be a little early, content to wait for a few minutes so as to never put the other person out. The problem with this is obvious. A late person leaves you waiting much, much longer. There are only so many times you can open the door for older folks in the lobby of your building, read the legal print on the card in your wallet or sing the song (in your head) about the old lady who swallowed a fly. I started writing. Not necessarily or overtly about the person who left me waiting, because if something bad had happened to them on their way, which in my fertile mind was infinitely possible, and I would hate to admit, a preferable, reason why they might be delayed, then my conscience would never recover from my last thoughts about them being angry or unloving.
I don’t know why she started to cry, perhaps she’ll die.
I tried to keep my hands busy. Once I began writing the clock had less meaning, I happily lost time and removed myself from my surroundings, all while appearing busy to passers-by. This was an important factor to me, since waiting with your head up, or constantly looking around the corner invites eye contact, greetings, inquiries, shame of being possibly forgotten or unconsidered. Little girl, are you still waiting here? To further hide what I wrote I began to devise my own “secret” alphabet, which was actually easier than it sounds if concurrently being taught cursive in school. In this way I felt slightly more free to make declarations of love and hate, and later the act of shredding or burning what I’d written always made me feel even better, perhaps like the control a bulimic feels when they purge, or tween-age girls playing at witchcraft.
Later, when I made a socially abrupt change from Catholic school to inner-city public school in seventh grade the writing was a way for me to process things like my new friends wondering if they were pregnant, who was selling which drugs and who was going to kick who’s ass. All along I’d been the bubbly-but-shy kid who didn’t exactly fit in but wasn’t much weirder than the others. I started keeping a journal but became so worried that my mother would find it I began not just hiding it, but ripping the pages out almost immediately shredding and burning them. It wasn’t the fire that got me in trouble (that was the balcony fire, damn wind), but it was almost a doozy. The last small fire I remember making, I started it in some sort of pottery or dish on the shelf in my closet where I realized a moment too late, was too close to some tissue paper. The lighted bits rose on the warmth of the fire’s breeze and threatened to travel to more papers, books, clothes. I smothered it all within a couple seconds but It scared the hell out of me.
I developed a new respect for fire, and lost respect for my own journal writing. The poetry lasted longer than the prose, though it became extremely embarrassing to have read, even if the person said they liked it. Almost all subject matter would have been taboo anyway (much like writing online). Attempting to cloud the words in metaphor and simile only worked to a degree, so I started trying fiction on for size. The results were utterly heinous and transparent and probably pretty cliché. I’m not sure if my father survived a single story (normal according to college workshops). The stories I was more proud of creating at the time were more in the Irish gothic tradition, not that I knew there was one. Perhaps it was nature being nurtured, but still. Intensely embarrassing and bad, I’m sure. If only I’d actually recorded what I’d actually done on any given day, and trusted beyong reason that no one would have read it. That would be some funny stuff I could be shamefully proud of.
I know I wrote about the trauma of being in love and not having it returned, and much about it being karmic punishment for the close friends who loved me, who I didn’t feel passionate love for, even if they deserved it. I wrote about sex and futility, of wanting things to be normal and nice and feeling that perhaps it was some sort of personal ruin or guilt that would never allow me to develop or have either. Normal adolescent stuff I guess. At a certain age I began to transcribe things to digital, and to create them with a keyboard as opposed to the pen of purple prose. It felt a little safer to have something that wasn’t always “right there” and easy to read accidentally. While this thought isn’t exactly rational or true, I remember feeling like, in some way, I could say, give a file a weird name or hide a disk in plain sight and have it just a tad bit safer. When I went to college I transcribed most of my surviving poetry, stories, and rants.
Turns out floppy disks are an extremely good way to hide and destroy writing, in the long run. The disks I initially used were formatted for a Smith Corona word processor: .pwp. I know. Shut up. I never claimed to be normal or smart.
For a while, when PCs were new, around Windows 3.x and up until XP, they actually read these disks without complaining. The invisible characters would be mangled, but with some patience and care, you could have the content in pretty good shape. The other problem since the bad old days is that most people don’t have floppy drives anymore. I borrowed an external one and tried it on my work laptop and home laptop. XP complains about i/o problems (if it mounts the disk at all). Mac was unhappy, not that I expected it to be. It didn’t even mount the drive, though the USB connection was working and the disk was spinning its little heart out. There was probably more I could have tried, but I felt, intuitively, that I was going to have to go old-school on these disks.
Keep in mind the disks had been in a paper shopping bag, in and out of storage, in and out of sun, under beds, and had their covers wiggled for at least thirteen years. Some experimentation was in order and so I went to the QA lab here at work, looking for a computer old enough to have a floppy drive (the borrowed one could have been the culprit). Seeking to emulate an older and hopefully less prissy environment. Remember back when computers were supposed to be confusing? You can download operating systems and have them run from disk, so once I found a PC with a floppy drive I downloaded Unix to run from a CD. Knoppix, actually, which is a super fantastic penguin creature offering the magical qualities I needed: a bootable live system on CD with automatic hardware detection, perfect for the sort of recovery I was attempting. I had hope, and a large amount of curiosity about this writing I did as a younger woman.
Knoppix read the disks once I remembered to mount and unmount them as a separate action, Konqueror allowed me to see hundreds of files, view them, loosely in their familiar broken format with the text editor Kate, where I finally zipped them up and emailed them to myself for detailed sifting and recovery back at the ranch.
Half of the disks were totally unreadable, just from time, wear and tear, and being floppies. Unfortunately, the vast, vast majority of the content was all just the standard lame college essay stuff, even some of my roommates’ homework, from when I let them use my word processor. Maybe two poems, tops, maybe one little rant, but it wasn’t very interesting and not very cringe-worthy. Clearly these were the disks relegated to the school stuff, and not my most personal ones (thus me willing to hand them to a roommate, I suspect).
I had enjoyed myself, fiddling around in Unix with floppy disks. It wasn’t Windows 3.1 or the classic Apple, and it wasn’t the old environment I worked in certainly, but the part I liked was the feeling of ritual, putting in a disk, performing a series of tasks, listening to the machine make its little computery noises. I was amazed at how much I actually did recover, and while disappointed for what was lost, and especially so for not having enough to bring to Cringe, it almost felt right. I’ve been destroyed my own stuff for as long as I can remember, what kind of world would allow me to have it all back? Perhaps it’s even a small mercy. We’re supposed to forget the daily traumas of adolescence recorded in the light of how wise and sensitive we thought we were. Though I will be sorry to not have things to share with my empathetic kin with laughter and booze. I’m happy if I can read something I wrote on this site in the past 3+ years and not feel repulsed or shamed (and believe me, sometimes i do) . If it can possibly stand the test of even a little time, maybe I’m getting it a bit more right. Either way, at least I can see where I was then, as opposed to now. I do not want to shred or burn this site, though my main frustration sometimes is that I wish it were anonymous so I could talk about a lot more in terms of lovelife, work, family, juicybits, moods, though that’s not it either. I think that for me, that’s not where my writing worth reading comes out. It’s nothing I’d be proud of in the short term, or long run. I’m happy that now, when I read something that sounds frilly or silly, my reaction is to edit, rework, and be grateful I can hear my voice when it’s off-key, and theortically could go back write it better, because at least I knew I had a point or a feeling I was trying share.
The disks are in my desk drawer now. I want to throw them away. I’m on the fence about it.
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