What album most reminds you of the year you turned 21 years old?

I’ll go first:

Stone Temple Pilots – Core

“Down you go, suffer long
Down you go, sin make me strong”

I feel… weird today. It’s something that I can’t quite put my finger on. I woke up this morning and I just felt ‘off’. I don’t know how else to describe it. I just don’t feel myself today.

Maybe it’s because I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother this morning. I dreamt about her last night. I’d wake up, panicked, and sit straight up in my bed. Immediately I felt on the verge of tears. After calming myself down I was able to fall back asleep. And then it happened again. And again.

So I wandered about the house today. I feel so, so lost. I’ve always been the kind of guy that’s perfectly OK without any direction. I’m a spontaneous, spur of the moment, impulsive person–usually. But today I felt so fucking lost, and I don’t know what to do. Something very important to me is missing from my life, and I can’t ever get it back. How do I go on from here? What do I do next?

And then I found my old journals. You see, I haven’t always been a blogger; only the last three years. But I *have* been a logger. Throughout my life I’ve kept journals. Four volumes that I can remember. And today I found three of them.

I sat down with the first one–a blue ringed notebook well beaten, battered, and worn. I wonder if anyone has read these things other than me? I thumb to the first page and the first entry of my writing career. It reads, “Wednesday February 10 1988”.

1988. I was still in high school. And my first entry? Was about the loss of my good friend at the time, Dahi “Jason” Dom. He moved to West Virginia and I never saw him again. Although, we did reconnect about three years ago when I started my blog. Small world eh? But I digress…

I sat in my room and read all day today. I read not every page in every one of my old journals, but pretty close. The things I would read have set the stage for my evening.

I feel small, tonight. And I feel tired. I feel like a lifetime of shit has just caught up with me. I have tried so very hard my entire life to leave the bad memories behind me and to try to focus on and remember the good things. But, being a (b)logger, I try to write just about everything significant down.

If there is a recurring theme throughout the last 18 years of writing, it is this: loss. My breakups with old girlfriends take up a good portion of my journals. Starting with Wendy in my Sophomore year of high school and all the way up to and including Cindy. And there is the loss of relationships; old friends long gone, and the different ways we all change as we journey through life. It is the changing part of friendships and people that somehow I have associated with loss. How people grow up and change, move away, and move on with their lives–and leave me behind. Or did I leave them?

And there is the missing journal to consider. When I was going through hell with Rosemary, I wrote an ENTIRE volume of words about her, my feelings for her, and what I was going through. And then one day when I was out to sea, I walked to the back of the USS Antietam and threw that book overboard. There have been times in the past that I have wondered about that book… did I make the right decision? Should I have kept it? Or did it represent something so incredibly painful that it’s for the best that I never re-live the memories? Maybe that book’s on the bottom of the sea. Or maybe it floated up on some beach, somewhere off the coast of India. There are still plentry of entries regarding Rosemary in my other journals, my website, and my memories to last me forever.

I was so different back then. Back in my teen years. And then my early twenties. The Navy changed me. It hardened me. And then the years after the Navy, the years in Long Beach, those changed me too. And then all of a sudden I was 30. What are these drunken and incoherent ramblings of a man alone in Chico and writing on a street corner at 3 in the morning? And now this year I’m going to be 35. What the fuck is going on around here? How did I get to this place?

I looked at myself in the mirror for a good, long while tonight. I’ve always had this image in my mind of the ‘me’, the real me, the Tom Bissell that I think I am. Not just physically, but mentally and spiritually. I looked at the man in the mirror today and looked past the physical, and wondered who I was now. I don’t know. The eyes in the mirror were not the eyes of a younger and happier man. These eyes looked cold and heartless.

Reading my journals all afternoon have kind of destablized me. I feel off-center, off-balance. I feel dizzy. It’s that weird feeling I described in the beginning of this post. The dreams about my mother and then reading my journals just brainfucked me.

I should be in bed.

“You control me, soul you stole, mine
…
Still shackled to the shadow”

i hate that alarm clock, corn pops for breakfast, throw in a dip, where is that UPS guy, marinate the steak, is dave coming over today, i miss my sister becky, happy 30th b-day deborah, it’s too warm already at noon, my favorite blue t shirt and old navy shorts, sunny i love you please hang in there, dad you look good today and happy too, i like my crappy cell phone because it used to be my mother’s, why won’t this piece of shit computer behave, i’m tired of being tired, turn the fan on full blast right in my face, i need to shave but i’m a lazy bum, too lazy to make lunch so it’s cold pizza again, is it too early to be drinking beer, my head hurts so i drink another, that ol’ ford ranger sure has been good to me–we’ve been a lot of places together–it feels like an old friend, nostalgic for life in long beach, i miss playing disc golf, i miss surfing in the morning before class, listening to jazz by the open window, books on my bookcase that i want to read again, schedule for august filling up, thinking about going back to college and getting my master’s, wishing i was 20 and thin again, i open my door and spit on the wood pile, staring at the clouds in the sky and wondering if my mom is really up there watching me, thievery corporation on my mp3 player, i don’t feel like making my bed today, sitting on the lawn soaking up the sun and doing nothing, ups brings my package, wave to shauna as she washes her truck, hi dave, more beer in the ice chest, put my feet up on my desk, happy that my friend is here with me, open all the windows and doors and crank the fans, cajun music with accordian and harmonica floats out into the street, rc cars in the dirt, bbq that steak, cousin kym brings me beer, pacifico with lime and a little salt, the flop the turn and the river online, truckee walt’s cabin bar of america and ponderosa golf course, life in long beach with dave on broadway and speed racer alley, bbq tri tip in basalmic vinegar olive oil garlic salt lemon pepper liquid hickory smoke, tugs of rum from the flask, brothers for life, finishing the can of copenhagen, happy but sleepy