***Where I Lived in 1974***

This was where I lived in 1966, 1976, 1986 and up through part of 1992. Our apartment was the one you can see lower left. This is the back side of the apartment house. We lived in the biggest apartment and it was the only one that went all the way through from front to back. 


The smaller building partly seen here is the Social Security Office which was literally in our back yard. It was owned by the same people who owned our building and ultimately would become special to me for several widely different reasons. 


The building still looks roughly the same and in recent years I took, on separate occasions, my wife, my son and my friend Brittany down there to be photographed out front the same way my mother photographed me so often as a kid. 

Introduction or Who Says You Can't Go Back in Time?

 In December of 2010, I came across a box with a couple of journals I had kept in high school in the 1970’s. I thought it might be interesting to read them and see how far I’d come.

But I hadn’t really. I’m a blogger. I have multiple blogs and I write about movies and TV shows and celebrities and comic books and cartoons. And that’s exactly what I was writing about in my journals way back in the mid-seventies! Once a geek, always a geek, I guess. My 1976 journal read like a 1976 blog by me might have read.

So I thought…why not? Make it an actual blog. My Net friends all said it was a lame idea. Even though I started work on it in mid-December, I nearly dropped the whole idea right at the last minute. But I didn’t. A GEEK’S JOURNAL 1976 went up on January 1st of 2011 and ran daily through December 31^st…just like my journal.

And here’s the thing. People related. People from literally all over the globe related to poor, lonely, geeky seventeen year old ME! AOL spotlighted the blog early on. BOING-BOING recommended it in mid-year. It was written up in a UK computer magazine, the local newspapers and reviewed on dozens of blogs in many different languages.

And outside of the inevitable few snarky comments, people all over the world somehow really did relate! I was flabbergasted!

For me, revisiting my earlier self with his hormonal issues and pop culture obsessions was educational but more to the point was learning that I really had NOT been as alone as I thought I was.

As the year came to a conclusion, the question came up---“What next?” I didn’t keep a journal in 1977. The only other journal I had was actually from earlier—my very first journal from when I was in the ninth grade.  So I asked on Facebook. Would anyone be interested in more of the same as a prequel? The answer was a resounding YES with much more enthusiasm than I could have expected!

So now, starting tomorrow, we return to those halcyon, pre-disco days of 1974, when I was 15 and even more awkward!  Thanks for all of your support. I hope you won’t be disappointed as tomorrow we once again time travel back to revisit unsuspecting teenage me!