So apparently my old DeadJournal, the Captain’s Log, still exists. I would’ve thought they’d delete these things after a certain period of disuse, but I guess that’s not the case. My last post there was on . . . January 9, 2003. And that was only so I could inform you, my gentle reader, that the blog was moving from DeadJournal to a new provider. The few posts before it were similar in content, as it was a a very turbulent time in the prehistoric, Joshbalesdotnetolithic period. My last, real honest-to-Zombie-Jesus post there was on October 1st, 2002. Skimming through the Log, I noticed that my writing style was a lot clunkier and repetitive back then, though I made up for it with a lot more angry ranting. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’ll post herewith that last post, entitled “‘curiouser and curiouser, eh, mortificator crenshaw?’”:

so some jackass hit a telephone pole in my neighborhood sometime Sunday night. consequently, i had no phone service until about 11 am today. this meant i couldn’t get on the internet. while this seemed irritating to me at first, it turned out to be a blessing. not only did i work on my website a lot (it’ll be up in about a week or so), i also finished writing my story and typed it up. so that was pretty cool.

nothing really new and exciting on this front. i’m getting kinda sick of emperor bush and all his war rhetoric, not too mention those scumfucks donald rumsfeld and dick cheney. all of them were business tycoons before going to their respective positions, and the economy is shit now. sounds a little fishy to me. granted, our sucky economy really should be blamed more on the clinton administration, because it’s just taken a while for the bad times to catch up with us. but all this talk of war is definitely not helping matters. has anyone else noticed that bush kinda resembles Emperor Palpatine in star wars? i know this is real geeky, but i’m being serious. palpatine was a duly elected president who secretly was evil, and when a time of crisis arrived, he “reluctantly” took on more power and became a dictator, and then the emperor of a galaxy. what is even creepier is that george lucas based the rise of his character on that of adolf hitler. so if you follow that reasoning, things get ultra-mega creepy.

just as i was getting off work, i mean i had just clocked out, and my cell phone rang with a number i didn’t know. turns out it was a chick i knew from a year ago at college. she was going through her cell phone, deleting numbers she never called. and she called me. i talked to her for about thirty minutes in the wal-mart parking lot. i’m supposed to call her next week so we can hang out. neat!

okay i’m gonna go work on the page some more. later.

Oh, what the little firebrand I used be. Aside from the barely-simmering-below-the-surface anger I displayed back then, there are a few other things of interest about this post, and, so it follows, me. (I use the term “interest” loosely here. Since most of you probably don’t give a fuck, I’ll post the rest of this behind the cut, and you can be on your merry way.)

If you’re still reading . . . well, you’re either a masochist or a loser, and I have no respect for you. There. I said it.

Anyway, one of the first things that might have caught your attention is the fact that I didn’t write in capital letters back then. For the life of me, I can’t remember where I picked this up from or why I thought it was a good idea. Probably something to do with being a nonconformist I imagine. I do remember that during my first year at WSU, my English 101 professor, Abigail, thought it was cute. And then when that wore off, she found it annoying and threatened to give me a bad grade in that sassy way that only she could pull off. I dropped the lower-case letter schtick sometime around Christmas 2002, I think, in an attempt to be more professional (lame) and haven’t looked back since.

Also on display — and this hasn’t changed much — is my hatred of Bush and his cronies, mixed with my full-swinging geekery. Frankly, I still think the Bush/Palpatine/Hitler comparison rings true, though my love of Star Wars has thawed. The new trilogy did its damnedest to ruin Star Wars, that’s for sure.

One final, minor thing (I swear!) is that my “signature” was quite inconsistent back then. (This being, of course, before I stole the “JAB” thing from Peter David.) Sometimes I’d sign just my first name, other times “[joshua]” and “-z-” and, like the above post, there’d be no signature.

I think I’ve improved greatly as a writer since then, though sometimes I wish I could channel the rage that I once was able to call upon in the space of a heartbeat. But then I think about how much nicer and happier I am now, and I’m better for it. However, beware, gentle reader: That fury I mentioned . . . though it’s been mostly stilled for a while, I can sometimes feel it inside of me, hungrily waiting to be released like mighty Cthulhu, waiting for me to lose my self-control.

And when I can’t fight it anymore, when it takes over, when I totally lose control . . . I like it.

JAB