It was an ungodly painstaking, time-consuming process.
I have been collecting data and burning it onto CD-R literally since January 2002, when I purchased my first computer with a CD-R drive (it was a Hewlett-Packard, 128mb RAM, Windows XP machine, and it literally died in two years -- but the hard drive and CD drive are still in my possession to this day as I put them both into my next machine).
I had, approximately, 800 discs.
Most of them were music and/or backup discs from computers long past -- when my whopping 10GB HD would get too full of pictures or podcasts or music, I'd back up that stuff on a CD-R (or a few of them) and delete. Every three months or so I would back up everything in order to make sure I had it on file in the event I needed it.
Now that my archiving work has completed, I have about 75 discs, almost all of them commercially purchased music CDs (which yes, I backed up digitally as well).
The remaining 725 or so were only part of my collection -- I know I have more, spindles upon spindles more somewhere in this apartment in a box or tub stuffed into a closet. Half of my music collection is missing, for one, and I know I didn't get rid of it. I paid good money for those albums; they're still here somewhere.
However, that's not the reason I came here to post this entry.
What I found on some of those discs was actually rather shocking to me, in a lot of ways. Pictures of friends I haven't seen in many, many years -- some of whom I can't even remember their names -- as well as chat transcripts from AIM (remember AIM?), tax forms, news articles I'd saved, obituaries of people I'd gone to high school or college with, letters I'd written but never sent, music from bands and artists I'd completely forgotten about, podcasts from 2003-07, multiple creative projects I thought were a good idea at the time until I realized they were actual work, etc. All of it a snapshot of time, frozen like Walt Disney's head.
Yes, I know Walt Disney's head was never frozen. Still.
I went through each CD one by one, pulled off the stuff I wanted to keep into some files on my current, two-terabyte hard drive, and if there was any personal info on said CD, put it directly into my powerful, $100 I-can-shred-a-book-if-I-want crosscut shredder as soon as I'd recovered the data I wanted. If there was nothing personal on it or it was just music backups or games or pictures downloaded off of image boards or the like, it just went into the trash after my plundering.
All in all, I recovered about 50GB of pure data. Some of the discs were so old that they were becoming unreadable -- disc rot is a thing -- but I was able to recover the vast majority of what I wanted.
Including some of my writing.
Church abhors me like nature abhors a vacuum. When I was a kid, the preacher of the church I attended asked me if I knew what Lent was. I told him it was the fuzz that comes out of the trap in the dryer. The room erupted in laughter, mother hid her face in shame, and we never again returned to church after that.
That's a true story, by the way.
If you’re at all internet-literate, then by now you’ve probably heard of (and probably use) some sort of instant messenger. Most of these programs have a feature which will let other users know when you’re away from the desk or currently unavailable. They’re called “status messages” or “away messages.” Here is a short list of some of my more memorable away messages:
Currently masturbating
Holy Crap Batman! He’s away from the desk!
Thinking about you naked
Getting naked and wet (for I’m in the shower)
All dressed up and no one to hang out with
All dressed up and no one to kill
Napping! Leeme ‘lone!
Would somebody please kill me so that I don’t have to go to college anymore?
Ever blow your nose and your nose vibrates really fast because so much air is being rapidly forced out BUT there are only 3 drops of snot on the tissue?
Yeahhh….umm, and I wonder why nobody talks to me when I’m online.
This is also true.
I'm slowly realizing that fifteen years ago, I was a whiny, attention-whore douchebag who either played the victim an awful lot or was just weird for weird's sake.
Here's a snippet of an actual resume I put together probably around my junior year of college. Junior year of college, folks.
So yeah, I was a weirdo. Hindsight is 20:20 and all that.
I did have a blog at the time, long since deleted and scrubbed from the internet now. It was called The Criminally Goofy, which sums up in a nutshell the person I was between 2002 and 2005, when I closed it down due to acquiring a stalker (yeah, that happened, it was weird and not fun). I actually have most, if not all, of the posts from that blog saved and archived in a few places, including on some of the CDs I just digitally archived this week.
And hoo boy is some of that shit embarrassing.
Like, I realize that 2003 is fifteen years ago and that people grow and mature. I used to think that I hadn't changed much, that fundamentally I am still the person I was back then, the same person I've "always been," so they say. Boy, was I wrong. Brandon at age 20 was whiny, phony, slightly psychotic, manipulative, suffered from "poor me" syndrome as well as the aforementioned perpetual victim complex, and I cannot for the life of me understand how any of my friends tolerated me during that several-year span. I was so stunned in reading some of the stuff I blogged about during that time that I had to send an email to one of my close personal friends to ask her how she put up with me.
No, I'm not putting any of that writing here, because college is a span of my life I'd really rather forget most of for many reasons, but it's also a span of my life where a lot of things happened that I flat out don't remember. I must've gotten into a lot of fights with my friends, as three or four of the posts I dredged up made reference to these fights and/or even transcribed some of them. I have no recollection of these things. Maybe that's my mind going in my old age, or maybe I blocked it out (like repressed memories or something) or maybe I was just too plain swamped by life to be able to remember every little thing that happened.
I whined about my relationship with my parents. I whined about being a virgin a lot (until, well, I wasn't one anymore, so that eventually stopped). I whined about how nobody truly understood me. I whined about being fat and unattractive -- even though back then I was about 20 pounds lighter than I am now and far more stylish in my appearance. Maybe a lot of those topics are universal and are part of growing up, but in my reading I noticed a very thick underlying immaturity to all of it -- writing done by someone who thought he'd experienced the world but in reality didn't have any fucking clue of what it was honestly like.
In 2005, after shutting that journal down, due to the fact that I'd obtained a stalker -- and not the fun kind, the blackmailin' kind -- I took a two year hiatus from active blogging/writing until I opened this blog in August 2007. I turned the first two years of this blog into a book, as some of you know (the manuscript needs a heavy re-editing job done to it before I can actually make it publication-ready again, and who knows if that will ever happen).
Anyway.
Archiving all this stuff -- going through it piece by piece -- makes me feel in some small way that I am being productive, doing something that somewhat means something or that I can feel good about. This doesn't happen much in my life anymore, honestly. My work (neither job, if I'm going to be completely honest about it) doesn't feel meaningful to me, doesn't feel like I'm bettering myself or the world. At home, when I'm off work, I do the same chores every week (when I have the energy to do so) just to keep the house maintained. I take no joy in it, it just is what it is. It is treading water, a concept I've mentioned here numerous times in the past.
But, there is excitement in nostalgia. There is excitement in finding what was once lost, excitement in remembrance and reminiscence.
As mentioned, there are many more CDs to find. The vast majority of my music collection is among them, as well as so many comedy albums, movies, and otherwise "lost data" yet to be reclaimed. I will find them here and there, bit by bit, as I slowly gut this room and decide what stays and what goes.
