METHodology

I stumbled across a journal tonight with a story in it that I wrote five or six years ago. I will probably tell that story here in the next day or so, but tonight I want to write about the journals I kept back then. First off, that story I came across ends in the middle of a sentence. I'm not kidding. There are five and a half pages and then it just stops mid-thought. I have no idea why I stopped writing the story. I don't even know exactly when I wrote it because it's not dated. It's handwritten in a book that I was using in the last months of my addiction and first several months of sobriety.


There are three or four different books that I wrote in back then. Some of the stuff is just pages and pages of my “business” accounting. At least for part of the time, I kept meticulous – if undecipherable – records of every transaction. If you are reading this and were a participant in all those shenanigans, fear not. I not only used code names for everyone, it looks like I used different code names every month. I can't imagine what good any of that did me when I'm sure I had no idea from one week to the next who was who and what was actually happening.

I'm soooooo glad I kept a lot of this stuff off the computer. I'm sure at the time I kept it off the computer because I figured it would be easier to lock up and hide if it were on paper, but now the beauty of it is that I get to see how my brain worked back then. So many neurons were firing at the same time that I needed to invent words to keep track of everything. Also, no idea was so good that it couldn't be made better by complicating it beyond comprehension.

Take my blog for example. It was pretty much the same as it is now, only it had these short pithy (at least I thought they were) reviews of many of the books I've read and it had a ridiculously long list of “favorite websites” that I never visited at all except the night I spent about 14 hours searching for favorite websites to put on that list. I wish I remembered some of them, but those are gone.

What isn't gone (THANK GOD) is my brilliant plan for how I was going to redesign the blog and turn it into a website with several different sections covering myriad topics. For reasons that now completely escape me, I had decided that it would be like a university. Each section would be a class (I even assigned how many credits each would be worth). Oh wait. I just remembered why it was like school – because of the name. Everyone would certainly get the college theme because it was psquared2thenth.com (I kept going back and forth on whether it should be the number 2 or just to). I had a syllabus and everything.

Here were the “classes” I envisioned:

Pathological Chemistry (8 credits) – Now this must have been the most important section of the website because it's the only one worth eight credits, but I have no idea what I intended to include in this section. It actually makes more sense now, because I write about all the stuff that happened when I was an addict. But I certainly had no intention of writing about that stuff back then so I can't for the life of me figure out what this was about.

Hyperbolic Divanometry (6 credits) – This one I remember. A lot of it is lost now, but I used to write all sorts of crazy shit about Beyonce, Jennifer Hudson, Diana Ross and a slew of other divas. In fact, if you click on the BWH label in the left-hand column (BWH stands for Blogging While High), you will find a couple of the posts I wrote back then. I think Baby Mama is my personal favorite.

Sports Psychosis (4 credits) – This one's pretty boring. It was just where I was going to put all my tennis posts. The difference is, back then they were wild. I wish I still had the bizarre mindset about tennis that I had back then. I used to crack myself up.

Triangulation & the Power of Me (3 credits) – An entire section of the website devoted to my obsession with Charmed and my honest-to-god belief that I had a Charmed power.

Etymythology & Critical Assumptiveness (6 credits) – I can't even begin to figure out what the hell critical assumptiveness is, but it must have been pretty damn special for this section to be worth six credits. I do remember what Etymythology is and to tell you the truth I think it really should be a word. Whenever I look for the origin of a word, I'll usually find a dictionary or online reference that will say, “From Latin. First Known Use 1764,” Who cares? That's not what I want. I want the STORY of the origin of the word. Who coined it? How did it happen? You know, the myth of the etymology. The etymythology.

Free Eclectives (3 credits) – I had a recurring post in my old blog called Eclectricity. I used it whenever I had a whole bunch of random thoughts that I couldn't turn into blog posts. I'd just throw them all on a page and post it. But for the website I wanted to expand that. I don't know what any of this means, but I listed the types of things that would go in this section: Free Radical Quotes and Random Numbers, Uncountably Infinite Tangents & Co-tangents and Irrational Proofs, Corollaries & Theorems.

Co-Sines of the Apocalypse (2 credits) – I wish I knew what this was about because it sounds awesome and I can't imagine why it's only worth two credits.

Some sections that are on the brainstorming page but didn't make the cut for some reason: Regression Equation, Harmonic Progression, Indeterminate Expression.

That is just one of several examples of what was going on in my head circa 2006. I don't remember how much time I spent coming up with all that, but looking over how focused I was on it it's no surprise that I was often 13 to 14 hours late for wherever I was supposed to be back then.