Reconstructed Timeline

My 2017 Daily Journal experiment seems to already be a success, sort of. I mean, I know it will be worthwhile someday. I know this because I find myself wishing more and more that I'd done this since college. I keep thinking of things like, "When was it that we went to that one restaurant and had such a good time?"  "Where was that series of pictures taken?" "What else happened surrounding that event?"

I am not journaling for any deep purpose. I am hardly recording any of my actual thoughts. I am just keeping track of what I did, and when and where I did it. What music did I listen to that defined the mood of that day? What gigs or piano lessons did I have? What was the weather that day? When did Liam go to bed? Details to mundane to blog about, so I don't.

But I find myself liking this private Word file more than the actual blog. The blog has gone by the wayside probably mostly because of this. I should do both! Dang it, how has the blog atrophied again?

Well, unfortunately, blogging is old-fashioned at this point. The heyday of my blog here has gone because everything these days is now Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. And I doubt the website is very mobile-friendly. The heydey of the blog was pre-smartphone.

Sometimes I find myself feeling that indulgent nostalgia is not enough; I feel like trying to actually re-create a specific day, but I lack the details to do it accurately. This, combined with some regrets about insufficient blogging over the years, gave me an idea. I could create a new journal document, same formatting of subheadings for each month and day of the year, retroactively. I could reconstruct a timeline of sorts. It would be more gaps than substance, obviously, but still worthwhile.

At first, I was focused on the time I lived in Ohio. So much had happened, in such a compact amount of time.  The thing is, I vividly remember all my thoughts and emotions. That's not a problem. That's why my 2017 journal is so dry. I don't want or need a diary. I want a timesheet. To keep my various thoughts, be they current or remembered, in proper context. Accuracy was important.

I had no illusions about having a "complete" account of my life during those days, but, out of curiosity and edification, I wanted to make a timeline graph, and maybe some pie charts, so really, honestly look at how much of my time was occupied by various things. Because it seemed so frivolous, I constantly shrugged off the urge to create this document. But the idea festered until I eventually took action.

I created the "BGSU Reconstructed Timeline" document. It has the following foreword:

This is an experiment. The purpose of this document is to attempt to reconstruct a daily log of the entire time I lived in Ohio, much like the 2017 journal, with minimal speculation. The approach taken is almost archaeological in nature, digging up facts from old blog posts, Facebook posts including those of other people, recital programs and CD dates, old event posters from the BGSU website archives, etc.

Note: This file was started in April 2017.

Anyway, I got as far as creating a subheading for every day I was there (two years), and I lost interest. It's nothing but a placeholder now. But then I went ahead and started a document for the same thing, for when I lived in Kansas City, which was the next chapter of my life after Bowling Green, Ohio.

This is an experiment. The purpose of this document is to attempt to reconstruct a daily log of the entire time I lived in Kansas City, just like the BGSU Reconstructed Timeline document, as factually accurate as possible, leaving no room for error or speculation even when leaning on extrapolation.

Note: This file was started in May 2017.

I created a placeholder for every day I lived there, then quit. So far, I hadn't done anything for these documents. I had more important things to do. More current concerns to worry about.

But I have been increasingly, intensely nostalgic for Kansas City since just over a week ago, triggered by various things, not the least of which was the re-circulation of certain music into my driving routine.  By coincidence, Herr Vogler visited Kansas City this weekend. Damn it, if not for the car accident, I could have taken a trip to intercept.

I am going to have to call him up and talk about it.

Yes, I call him Herr Vogler, his commenting moniker, instead of using his real name, because I am clinging to the style of the way the blog was, around a decade ago. Back in the days when the same loyal readers were involved in comments to the point where they influenced the way I would craft my posts. Nowadays, if anyone is reading this blog, so much of my references would go over their heads, so I can't write as though the blog were still the primary source of social information. Again, Facebook has conquered the world, and the very use of this blog feels anachronistic. Well, Robot Hilda might have something to say about that.

And now we come to my real purpose for this blog, the musings I've had after spending sporadic moments the past several days sneaking in some free time...

I just finished rereading every single blog post from the time I lived in Kansas City, including the two visits since I left. I lived there from September 2006 to April 2008, then visited in December 2009 and again in March 2010 on my way down to Texas, when I first moved here.

Beyond the blog posts and comments, the next step is to dig up old emails and activity on my (and others') Facebook timelines. I also just remembered that a few years ago I used the tag feature on Google Maps with my dormant account to write notes on various locations. I could glean a lot from those. Again, I have most of the memories intact, but the chronology... I was always clear about remembering my thoughts and feelings, but could never quite keep straight when things happened. That is the purpose to this experiment.

But here, at the coffee shop, I just finished rereading all my Kansas City-era blog posts.

It feels... strange. Complicated.

There are many regrets. Regrets I had back then, at the time. Regrets I had later. Regrets I have now. Some of them overlap. Some of them are directly opposing each other. It is no secret that I had a hard run of things, but I still cherish my time there. But it's hard to want to relive the harder days, like when I was laid off right before Christmas, and the downward spiral after that. The point of a reconstructed timeline is to have journalistic integrity, to prevent the whitewashing of the past.

One thing that stands out in my mind today is the tone of many of those posts. I think things really did come across wrong. I was constantly being called out for being too defensive, that I cared too much about what others thought of me, that I complained too much. Reading it now... yeah. To two out of three, anyway. I actually held back quite a bit about complaining. I became increasingly reticent as the months went on.

One of the ongoing themes of the blog posts from those days was that I was defensive about other people suggesting I wasn't managing my time or resources well enough. It led to many arguments in the comments, some of which were deleted at the time, and thus have since been forgotten. But what I failed to explain in my rebuttals was that I was not just being paranoid: I was responding directly to individual conversations, particularly on the phone or on Facebook with friends from Bowling Green State University. Remember, this was the year after all that shit went down, so I had a lot of chips on my shoulder and monkeys on my back. But if you were just reading the blog by itself, you wouldn't get that. I just came across as wounded. And I was, to be sure. But I was being constantly and easily offended by the passive-aggressive nature of BGSU interactions post-BGSU. I was almost always working on something, some composition project, but it bothered me that I didn't seem to make any outwardly obvious, significant achievements. I had a weird, post-graduate guilt complex whenever I would mention playing video games, too. I had a lot to get over after BGSU, and the blog posts from KC suffered from it.

And my friends would sometimes get tired of it. I regret that. I regret keeping some pertinent details to myself, too. But... some of those comments were unfair.

Reading it all again, though... wow, how things are different now. Obviously, in ten years, you will have a different perspective.

I don't know. I just thought it was worth a blog post. For old time's sake.

It is ironic, though. Back then, I was worried people would think I wasn't working hard enough if I talked all the time about having too much fun. Nowadays, if anything, I worry that people don't think I have any fun. Juliet's cancer, the car accident, the other hardships... I find myself telling people that I regret how my name is no longer synonymous with "a good time," but with "a sad story." I have told multiple people, "I just want it to be like it used to be, where you'd think, 'Tim Scott... now that's a fun guy to be around.'" I could care less what you think about my musical involvement. In fact, I've been pretty diligently working on a project in absolute secret. Talk is cheap, and only when (IF) it gets finished, will I even blog about it. Ironic.

Now, I find myself wishing I had blogged more often back then! (And ever since, really.) Too much information can backfire, but... Hey, why not? It's not like Facebook, anyway. It's not like I'm going to inundate people who get annoyed by my personal information: you have to come here and actually go to the effort of reading my boring tales and embarrassing antics. Facebook can work against you, but maybe the fact that this blog is so easily ignored will be its salvation: maybe I can really blog like the good old days, only with more detail.

On the other hand, the point of a blog post is to be well-written, which only a tiny percentage of mine ever were. I don't want to flood the market. But the 2017 Daily Journal has stolen my attention from this blog. Maybe instead of supplanting it, there's a happy medium. Maybe it can complement the blog. Maybe it can be the "raw data" for what will be crafted into blog posts.

I don't know. I have a lot more to say about Kansas City reflections, but I also think maybe I should get back into posting habitually here.

The fear of what people think of me has been replaced by the need to "be real." But there is such a thing as too much information.

At any rate, I have more time travel to do. I have more excavating of lost details to get around to soon. I have to reconstruct the timelines of the various chapters of my life. It's like I'm desperately writing my memoirs before senility claims my faculties, but I'm only 35.

After Juliet recovers... say, in November... I really do want to finally visit Kansas City. I thought, once I moved here in March 2010, that I'd have an annual visit. But whenever I plan something, it gets rescheduled, delayed, defunded, canceled, or thwarted in some way. I've given up on empty promises of that "someday," because part of me fears it will never happen. Every week, the crew of Voyager would talk about getting back home to the Alpha Quadrant, but you knew they never would, or the show would be over. I'm not saying I'm counting on visiting in November, or ever.

But I'll be around.

I have to publish this without proofreading, because I have to be somewhere. Without proofreading? It doesn't get much more "real" than that.

I'm sure I have more to muse on, having reread a year and a half of my life. But that's it for now. We'll talk soon.