Part of this process has involved going back through decades of stuff I’ve written, combing through hundreds of documents and deciding what is at least decent and what is unquestionably embarrassing juvenalia. There seems to be a fair amount of both. For every turn of phrase I’m glad found voice, there seem to be several which makes me cringe. Or not just cringe but flinch – physically recoil at the self-importance, the pretension.

(Am I really selling you on this so far?)

What’s most interesting in those high school poems (I don’t consider teenage angst interesting) is that they all rhyme. They use a variety of rhyme schemes, but they all rhyme. How much time I must have spent going through “back, cack, dack, fack, oh flack! Boom. Nailed it.” It was also around this time I started saying “that’s the bomb.com” because the internet was new, URLs were novel, and I enjoy running something deep into the ground, burying it under tons of dirt and then salting every inch of every mound of dirt to ensure no one ever, ever wants to hear from me again.

Also, my handwriting was amazing.

Look at that handwriting! Ignore the handwringing!

So yes, combing through these poems has been an adventure through space and time, truly making me Doctor Who at last.