i recently had an Actual Nightmare where I got banned from bzpower. like the kind where you wake up and have to check just to reassure yourself that it's not real. it's funny--it's not like i really come on here very much anymore. it's not like anyone comes on here very much anymore. if my account were to actually be banned it would make no difference in my life.

when i joined bzpower, i was eight; now i find myself uncomfortably close to thirty. thirty still seems so old to me. i could never--not as a kid or a teenager, not even in my early twenties--conceive of being thirty. i still can't. and yet the calendar insists that there are just a few years left.

as i get older, i find myself trying to hold onto tchotchkes of my childhood--things that have no functional value to me now except in the conveyance of memories. sometimes they appear in my dreams; bzpower is not unique in this regard. i want to remember who i was, where i came from, to keep from finding myself unmoored in time. when i was a teenager, i was glad that bzpower lost the old forums database and majhost went down and spared me the humiliation of knowing my awful attempts at a sprite comic or my execrable fanfictions were still out there somewhere. now i find myself saddened by their loss. no one else will mourn them, of course. (nor, frankly, should they.) none of these things had value to anyone but me.

the banning of this account would represent a final foreclosure on that past, an admittance that it's over and done. realistically, that past is gone forever anyways and there is no going back--but while it exists i can pretend, if only for a moment, that it is still 2005, still 2008, still 2012, can step back into my old selves and see the world through their eyes.

at least this blog remains, in its entirety. its first entry (actually, its first four entries) was posted the very day blogs were made available on this site. the things i wrote as a child survive, even with their atrocious spelling (faveorite???) and utterly vapid content (i was, in retrospect, not a particularly smart kid). by my teenage years i had mostly moved on from bzpower, but you can see bits and pieces of my adolescent struggle for self-actualization posted here. none of this will mean anything to any of you. this very post is nothing more than an exercise in self-indulgence. but it means something to me.

i'm glad i'm not banned.