Every Wednesday is garbage day in our neighborhood.  And like everyone else I have to make sure that everything is out on the curb bright and early because who knows exactly when the big green truck is going to rumble by and clean the slate until next week.  Unfortunately in our neighborhood they don’t give out a prize each week for the household that produces the most bags of trash.  If they did, we would have that bad-boy locked down, no contest.  Some weeks it’s not uncommon for our curb to have as much garbage waiting to be picked up as two or three houses combined.  Seriously, our house is a garbage factory due in part to the fact that on some days there are as many as 5 kids under the age of 5 here, and due somewhat to the fact that we’re just a bit lazy when it comes to separating out recyclable stuff from the rest of the trash, and not using the garbage disposal to actually “dispose” of uneaten or bad food.

However, determined to remove the label as being the most prodigious garbage producing home on the block, I actually made a concentrated effort to toss everything that is remotely recycle-able into the proper bin, and let the garbage disposal annihilate and pulverize as much as possible for one week.  It actually worked!  This week we were down to one large plastic garbage bag and one very full recycling bin (as well as the grass clippings, but I don’t count those, they’re seasonal).  It’s not quite as good as our neighbor who somehow is able to only put out the recycling bin and his yard waste.  Which means he’s either a super recycler and doesn’t waste ANYTHING, or he’s a hoarder and only throws away his beer cans and the rest of his house is accumulating garbage.

Over the weeekend I was rummaging around our basement, and I stumbled across a series of journals that I kept through most of high school, college, and for a few years afterwards.  At one point  in life I had aspirations of becoming a writer, and one of my favorite daily columnists was Bob Greene of the Chicago Tribune.  Greene published a book entitled “Be True To Your School” which essentially was his own journal of 1964  growing up in the small town of Bexley, Oh.  Later on while at the Tribune, Greene wrote about journaling as the single best exercise to practice, develop and improve your writing skills, so naturally I picked up a pen and started filling up legal pads with whatever was going on in my life that day.

Like most projects that I dive into head first, the entries (or “posts” in today’s interweb based vernacular), were frequent, long and dense.  Over time the content tended to wax and wane due more to procrastination and laziness rather than any real inspiration.  But a quick skim through a couple of the volumes sitting on the floor of my basement was like attaching a couple of jumper cables to the memory batteries in my brain.  Some of the stuff I did and wrote about was amusing, some of it embarrassing, and some of it just plain weird, but it was interesting to see how I viewed the world then, compared with how I view it now.

Several of the volumes had sustained some flood damage, some were faded, and some were just plain difficult to read because my handwriting was (and still is) even hard for me to read sometimes!  I’m looking forward to continuing to re-visit my past, and possibly sharing some of it here.  While my outlook on the world may be the complete opposite of what it was 20+ years ago, I’m a firm believer that some things never change, and for better or worse, your experiences of the past eventually manifest themselves in the person you are today.

“Yo….I’m up from my afternoon siesta….I need my sippy cup and my iPhone….gotta take care of some major business…….”

“OK let’s see……stock market closed….everything looks good……Oh, I totally PWNED that ETrade baby today!  SUCK ON IT you commercial shill….that clown couldn’t trade his way out of an equity option spread if his 18month old life depended on it……”

“Seriously….everyone knows he just piggybacks his trades on his babysitter’s….who happens to be an unemployed Lehman Bros. analyst with an MBA from Harvard…..man if she ever finds a job on Wall Street or starts her own hedge fund….he’s not going to know what hit him…….as my older brother would say ‘too bad, so sad’….”

“One last check on the opening quotes from the Asian markets…..stop loss orders are all set…..now I have to check Facebook, and send out a tweet about the hot steamer that I just unloaded into my diaper……OH, DADDY!”