Past On: Accidents, Intrigue and a Really Old Blog

Someone once told me to get my head out of my past.

I remember the look on his face, this guy with the yellowish-red beard and the dark yellow car that reminded me of bad egg salad. We were stuck in traffic on Ashland Avenue on a hot Tuesday afternoon, lost somewhere in 2006, and my mind had wandered to the usual distance places it seems to find in the most inopportune moments. As my little red Jetta chugged through the urban smog of petrol and angst, I hardly noticed myself veering into the right lane until I heard the clink of my passenger's side mirror careen into the car next to me.

It took the driver no longer than three seconds to slam on his breaks and hurl the words.

"Good dammit lady, get your head out of your ass!"

He yelled this before trying to maneuver his pseudo-vat of egg-salad-on-wheels to a vacant side street to further expel a slew of obscenities in my face while I gave him my insurance info in warbling shame. There were the apologies, my physically trembling body extending "I'm sorries" at least 10 to 12 times all the while knowing, yes, yes, my head was certainly up my ass and definitely up my past.

It didn't take me breaking off some guy's driver side mirror to teach me I was dreamer. My whole life I spent dreaming about pasts I never lived in but wanted to live in, even as I was growing toward the future. Progressing, as my mom used to say, "keeping things on the up and up." At 38, not much as changed. I find the things that I'm drawn to most are those still lives and photographs that are frozen in the past—albeit the shadowy alley ways of 1977 New York, a mall fountain with faux rock formations blazing in all its 1981 glory, the mystique of a high school dance where a band takes the stage instead of a DJ.

That's why it's not surprising that when I recently stumbled upon an old blog of mine I kept around the time of the auto-tracity with Mr. Angry-Egg-Salad, I started thinking about this version of my past—a file drawer filed with misguided, aimless decisions I've chosen to keep locked for a very a long time. I was freelance writing back then—getting $25.00 paychecks for 500-word pieces, bartending in an exhaustingly cliquish scene, and vying for the attention of guys who, on the quality scale, made salisbury steak look like michelin-star cuisine. I'm not starting this to open old sores, but I am here to acknowledge these things and moments that set in motion the next of course of my life—a brighter life that involved self-respect (sometimes?), creative respect, and meeting the kinds of new faces that would turn Joan Didion in Goodbye to All That into a believer. Even as I'm moving forward some years later, I'm still always in some way looking back, because so much of myself is enamored with the past.

Well, maybe not that past. I'll leave the broken car mirrors and well-deserved obscenities on the hot street corners of 2006 and stick to exploring the pasts that are worth it.

And there's a lot to explore. Join me.