Happy Birthday to me

Ten years ago today, I started something: Sunday July 27th, 1997, I sat at a computer in Charlottesville, Virginia and uploaded my first ever online diary entry. It tells the tale of a day's tubing on the James River; of waking up on the Kappa Mutha Fucka couch with no memory of getting there; of not having taken out my contact lenses for three days. It's an inauspicious beginning - it doesn't really say very much – though I do still raise a smile at the remembering of one occurrence…

"After the car incident, I was determined to make a good impression on Deya's folks. I had been informed that Mr Ramsden was an ex-alcoholic, so it would be best to keep my beer from his sight. Unfortunately, my attempt to hide it resulted in me spilling it all over their couch! The ludicrousness of the situation got the better of me and an attack of the giggles ensued. Needless to say, it wasn't quite the impact I'd been looking for..."

Ha! That seems like a very Rory-esque thing to do! (The 'car incident', of course, was the occasion I woke up – once more, on the KMF couch – to be informed that someone had taken Deya's car in the middle of the night and left it in a ditch a few miles away with a burnt-out clutch and a punctured tyre, and that I was the prime suspect – 'cept the last thing I remember was drinking enormous shots of rum from a glass vase with a chap called Monster Boy…) Anyway, fun to reminisce…though I find what I was doing exactly a year later a more entertaining read: I love reading that! (Did you click??) Ah, how lovely to have those memories brought back to life through the power of those words! What a time that was. What a very special time in my life. Marvellous! And thank God for my friend who found 70ish percent of my journal a few years back after I'd somewhat hastily deleted all eight hundred thousand words of it back in Dublin, 2002. That was perhaps a little silly! It's funny…I'm so different to who I was back then but…I like who I was back then, too. I seem like rather a fun-loving young man. Oh, what a life I've lived! Happy birthday, Down The Rubadub In A Terry Nutkins Stylee, Postcards From NowHere, Message To The Universe, happy birthday!