Blame It On Midnight…

“…shame on the moon.”
-Bob Seger, Shame on the Moon

My friend Mike and I were talking the other day about random things and it turned out that we had both stumbled upon a cache of 3.5 floppy disks in the last few weeks and wondered what random data was contained on them, since neither of us had a floppy drive anymore. I told him that I’d found some cheap USB drives online and was waiting until I got paid to order one. He decided to get one and brought it over tonight so I could recover my old files.
I just spent the last three hours or so reading these files, mainly ancient AOL Instant Messenger conversations. Stuff from a dozen years ago or thereabouts, just mind-bogglingly nostalgic. It doesn’t hurt that I’d spent the evening hanging out with Mike and Lee, who were both good friends of mine even then. Both of whom, in fact, were mentioned in the discussions I’d had. I was already primed for nostalgia.
An hour or so in I was laughing and making little comments under my breath to myself. I found myself surprised to say that I missed some people that, in recent years, I had either forgotten about or hadn’t particularly cared for, for one reason or another.
More surprisingly still, I was filled with a profound and disquieting sense of missing myself most of all. I was looking back at myself as a young and still mostly unformed man, the idealistic and romantic fellow that gradually turned into me. I’m depressed and ashamed at the person that is sitting here writing this, and I wish he were more like the person whose correspondence I was reading earlier.
I’ve been more and more acutely aware of how much I’ve given up on all the silly dreams that I had when I was young. It seemed until tonight that it was a good thing, a mark of maturity and acceptance and now I’m just shocked at how I’ve turned out. I read in a chatlog that I saved twelve years ago about how my goal was to be a wasted talent, and it’s horrible that the only goal that I’ve ever achieved was that one.
Once upon a time, I wanted to change the world. Now, I’m trying to figure out where to start with just changing myself.