Last night I unearthed a stack of typed pages that I wrote when I was twenty. They appeared to be, for the most part, journals I kept between May and August of 1993.

I read through them and was astonished at how detailed I was in my recollections of almost every day. It was around the time that I was moving from campus housing to my first real apartment in Olympia, with Joshua P. I was unemployed but looking for work. I was taking road trips, going to and putting on shows, including Rancid’s first show outside of California. They stayed at my house and I managed to recount just about every detail and conversation.

My writing seemed so much better back then. But I was practiced, I wrote every day. I devoted a couple hours to it each day probably, mostly done at the Smithfield.

As I read through tales of my adventures, the memories of small details unfolded slowly. It’s funny the way these things remain stored there, no matter how tiny. Like the time me and Aaron Cometbus went to the Olympia Brewery to get free beer (I wasn’t 21 yet, so I had Pepsi), then snuck off through some side door in the brewery and ended up in this tiny room underneath a gigantic boiler. I took handfuls of stickers I found there, and when we were done exploring, we left and walked all the way back to town, but not before scamming a couple free calls from a pay phone.

I was really quite the criminal back then.