Ooh, do I love you

To the left is part of a film I'm currently working on. It's an art print that will be in my upcoming show at My Addiction Gallery in Tucson, AZ. The show is called, Expeditions For Momentum and will feature other new and current prints, as well as new paintings and drawings.

Shifting gears of mammoth proportions, has anyone ever used that Wayback Machine website? It's an internet archive site that catalogs millions of pages from as far back as the mid 90's.
Today, I used it to search for defunct web pages of my friends' old bands, my first band (formed in 1999, yo), old web zines, etc. It has brought back a lot of memories. More specifically, the memory of the general feeling from certain periods of time. I suppose I'm using archived web pages from ten and eleven years ago in the same Pavlovian fashion in which one might listen to old songs from a previous time period. At the moment, I'm feeling rather nostalgic.

To be clear, I am not hung up on the past, and I'm not feeling old. The present happens to be pretty awesome, and twenty-six years is not old, dammit.
However, being twenty-six means that when I use a phrase like, "ten years ago," I am finally referencing a time in which I was kind of the person I am today. I have many of the same friends, interests, beliefs, and I still draw all the time. "Ten years," I've apparently decided, is some kind of temporal right of passage. Perhaps it just seems significantly longer than "eight years" or "nine years." Either way, it's a pretty long time.
It's rather amazing what a simple cue like seeing an archived web page can do for one's memory. I suppose it's the digital equivalent of looking at old photographs, show listings and setlists from bands I saw in high school. They're still in a box somewhere in my parents' attic. I remember shitty third-hand cars with stickers on the rear window, the sense of urgency when the Fireside Bowl announced upcoming shows, playing on playground forts as teenagers, and a brief stint of punk shows at a coffee house in my hometown.
I remember skateboarding in my friend's driveway and on the street in front of my house on homemade boxes and grind rails. I remember reading copies of Thrasher Magazine on the bus, happy to be out of school for the day. I remember piling into someone's car to drive to the Fireside Bowl and making it a total adventure without having to make any special effort or even really think about it. I remember me and my friends genuinely being exited about each others' bands and when cassette tapes were still a relevant format. I remember listening to a Texas is the Reason seven inch in my room with my first girlfriend. I remember when an impending summer was essentially winning the lottery.
I'm not bummed out about this. As I said, I'm pretty stoked on the present. It just kind of felt appropriate to try to articulate what I was feeling when I started to write this entry. By now, I'm starting to think about how I need to eat something before I head to the Hideout to see my friends in Aids Wolf play a show.