What were you doing when you were 23?

I was going to college part-time, stringing four nights a week and working full-time on the graveyard shift in a credit card facility. Needless to say, that did not end well. Ran myself into the ground, nearly had a mental breakdown/epiphany on the belt one night and dropped both jobs for the first newspaper gig I could find.

Talked my way onto a 3K weekly (editorial staff of two), did layout for the first time and took up photography for the first time since ninth grade. It's been onward and westward since.

 

At 23, I got rid of everything I owned except the stuff that fit in the back of my pickup truck, hauled it all out to California on a four-day, 2,500-mile road trip by myself, and started the job I have now.

First piece of furniture I bought was a $20 bookcase from Target. Then a do-it-yourself desk from Wal-Mart. Slept on an air mattress in my ghetto apartment for six months until I could afford to buy a real bed.

Best move of my life, believe it or not.

 

Learning all about life.

I was working my first job in the profession. I was the sports editor AND the county reporter. Courthouse, trials, county commissioners, etc., during the day, high school games at night. I was making $125 a WEEK; my first raise was $5 a week.

I was living in an apartment and next door was a magnificent-looking nursing student. The legs she had . . . wish I had the nerve to ask her out. Never did; always regretted it.

 

I was worthless, working in a liquor store, drinking all of my pay.

Good times.

 

That's the way to do it.

 

At 23 I graduated college and fulfilled my lifelong dream: getting a job exactly where I wanted, meeting the woman I would marry and attaining the greatest sense of serenity I would ever know.

 

Shut up.

 

Sorry. I still got the first two, serenity not so much.

 

I was working at a 30K daily in the mid-South along with a bunch of people right around my age, which made the whole experience a great deal more fun that it would have been otherwise.

One of my co-workers and I shared the upstairs portion of a subdivided Victorian mansion, paying $175 a month each. I had no credit cards, no car payment (I was driving a 12-year-old Chevrolet Citation, a fine car -- seriously) and no debt of any kind. My idea of splurging on my $390-a-week salary was to drive 30 miles to the nearest decent-size city and have a meal at the Olive Garden, which seemed to me at the time to be the height of fine dining.

In some ways, I yearn for that kind of simplicity.

 

I was living in an almost bare (futon and TV only) $675-a-month efficiency apartment while making $17,500 a year. Smoking dope and playing Final Fantasy VII while trolling along as the city hall reporter for a small daily.

I bought beer for a kid who worked at a local big-box grocery store. In return, he would steal cartons of Marlboro Lights.

Defaulted on my college loans, had check floating down to a science. Drove a 1985 candy-apple red Buick Skylark whilst drunk and returning from our paper's biweekly payday-Wednesday excursion to the local bar for 99-cent Natural Light (mmm ... the only beer you have to chew, and on tap!!!)

Had a blast. Ten years later, wouldn't change a thing if I had it all over again. (OK, maybe the defaulted loans part.)

 

When I was 23, I killed my first kitten.

Oh, wait, that was 13! Maybe 12.

 

If god really kills a kitten every time you touch yourself, I am responcible for three deaths before i even have my breakfast.