I have been writing in a journal on an almost-daily basis since I was 17 years old. This is a record of me going through each entry from the beginning, and commenting on the me from fifteen years ago.

My grandpa died not a day or two ago and no one’s really sad, least of all me. Everyone expected him to die and in the less than a year since my grandmother died he became a nothing man. Just a backdrop to a world surrounding. He’s gone now, officially. He’s was gone long before the papers were in. I’m not going to die a nothing man. I’m going to shine until I burn out in a flash. I’m going to shock the world and my death will be something. I want to be someone when I die, so I will.

This is a depressing entry for me, because it reminds me of my high level of self-absorption I had. So much so that I turn an entry about my grandfather dying into a diatribe about how I will not go out like he did – which is bullshit anyway because my grandpa certainly wouldn’t have chosen to go blind, deaf and suffer dementia. He wasn’t a nothing man, I was for not learning about him before he passed on.