My So-Called Decade
[Dear readers: I’m back from a hiatus in June due to a job transition and shake up that I’m happy to report turned out for the best. But it took a lot of my attention away from writing. I’m overjoyed to be back at it. Thanks for sticking around.]
Ask me about the 1990s and I’d probably shrug.
What’s to remember?
It was tough because I decided, late in 1992, to take “the road not taken.” Or better yet, “the road no one with any sense would take, you selfish moron.”
Okay, I’m being way harsh here, but two forces were at work on me: the sublime memory of 1989’s script-writing marathons all leading up to a two-week research trip to England around the time of my 30th birthday. The weight of that experience taught me there was a groaning banquet table full of life’s rich pageant just beyond the corporation parking lot.
The world did not begin and end in the backwater burg of Hopkins, Minn.
The pressure on the other end was: So if not this, then where?
What should I do with my new decade?
Where and how should I live?
Three journals ramp up to that transition, which I made on Dec. 7, 1992 (hard to forget, since it was Pearl Harbor Day). But it interests me now what was going through my mind prior to that landmark date: What have I forgotten that is just waiting to be recovered on the pages of those 1990-1992 journals?
It begins with financial stress, according to a Monday, Aug. 13, 1990, entry:
“I worry about money a lot lately. I feel detached and indifferent about old friends—and a little resentful of my isolation. Things go bad, but there’s no real sorrow in the loss, I’m not even the owner of my own sadness. There is one way of being that appeals to me: looking out from myself, rather than IN. IN says: ‘What do I look like? Hair’s too long, a bit dumpy in the face, scruffy, can’t concentrate, not connected to other people. A cesspool of self-consciousness…’ OUT says: ‘But there’s a whole world of other things TO BE! Why not change them? Cut your hair all the way off! Quit your fucking job! Just say NO to limiting ways of thinking…start doing things instead of thinking about them: write that new story, finish that script, paint that picture, buy those new clothes, read that new book!’ —That’s the voice I want to heed.”
Did I heed it? That’s the $100,000 Question.
All I can say at this point is the 1990s were my roller coaster decade. The first couple years were ramp up, corporate frustration, then in 1992—boom, off on a cloud.
How I got there?
Well, stick around.
Completely in the Dark 