Tuesday, May 31, 2011

The lost years

My trip to Beijing back in the late 90s was a very memorable experience but one thing i remember most about it was not remembering something. I don't remember several hours of my life (alcohol assisted in this i believe) one night when i was there. One moment i was in a bar and the next i was waking up at my friend's apartment. What happened in those hours between? Apparently nothing but to this day its a total blank. As someone who likes to be in control of his life i find these blank hours a bit unsettling.

However another total blank is even more unsettling, at the weekend i was looking through my junk room at home when i found a couple of Ladytron CDs. When did i buy these? Obviously it must have been in the late 90s or early 00s but i had no recollection of it. In fact much of the period from 1998 to about 2002 is quite vague. I seemed to have dropped out of the world.

News stories of the Balkan wars such as the recent arrest of Mladic seem strange to me as i don't remember the wars at all, now these days i am always very wired into whats going on in the world (i predicted food prices would see some states topple about 6 months before the Arab Spring began for example) but in the late 90s i appear to have tuned out for awhile and didn't keep up with... well anything much. Even TV is vague from those times, i sometimes catch great shows i missed on first time around from those years.

So what was i doing? No i wasn't in prison or on drugs. I think i was lost in the online world, as i might be from time to time now, but at least i still read the news nowadays. To be truthful i don't really know what i was doing during those years and that is probably the most unsettling fact of all.

No comments:

Post a Comment