25 nostalgic things you remember from a specific year or decade!

[Trevor]

 Learned lots of skills there, including getting a forklift license.

"He tried to kill me with a............" oh, never mind 

[Alex]

1988.

1) The Piper Alpha disaster struck. Everyone in Scotland knew someone who lost someone it seemed.
2) The bombing of flight 103 and the crash of its wreckage into Locharbie. I remember exactly how I heard about it. I was on a hillwalking trip to Arran with my school. My favourite art teacher, Mr McNure came into the boy's room and told us about it. These two along with Dunblane would be the biggest disasters to hit Scotland so far in my lifetime, in terms of the cost of lives. The sea was rough when we tried to come home at the end of the week and we ended up spending 8 hours on a ferry circling around Ardrossan harbour waiting for the conditions to be right for it to dock.
3) Me and a friend went on a camping trip to the isle of Arran with no adults. We walked from Brodick to Corrie and camped just up from a landmark called the Cat Stone. I regularly visited the area going hillwalking in the winter and canoeing in the summer.
4) I got to choose the subjects I would study at school for the next two years. I took history but refused to do Modern Studies because I hated the teacher that took that class, even though she thought highly of me and I got high marks in the subject. I then got her as my history teacher. The subjects we get taught in history turned out to be the boring parts in between interesting events (like the UK between WW1 and WW2, or Britain from the end of the Napoleonic War through to the Great Exhibition which failed to mention anything about the empire at the time, or any of the wars we were involved in).
5) I got my first job. I delivered milk, getting up at 4 am, worked until 8 am, and then going to school. Afterwards, I'd be collecting money until 9 or 10 at night. Combined with my alcoholic next-door neighbours having a habit of falling asleep with their music blaring out at full volume all night long, this left me frequently tired to the point where I'd see red polka dot spots floating in front of my eyes and fall asleep in class. Pretty sure this influenced my final grades and not in a good way.
6) I started studying Shakespeare and came to the conclusion that he was very overrated.
7) I bought my first vinyl album with Guns N' Roses 'Appetite For Destruction', then followed it up with Iron Maidens 'Number of the Beast' and 'Powerslave'.
8) I also started my VHS collection. The first one I bought was 'Creepshow'. Unlike my albums, I don't have any of my old VHS tapes today alas.
9) Having my own money meant I could go out independently for the first time. I'd regularly go shopping in Glasgow with my circle of friends.
10) You know when you get a year in your childhood when the friends you had were the best ones you ever had in your life and one that just really stands out for you? This was one of 3 such years for me.
11) I went to Games Day for the first time. It was held in Donington. Me and a friend, William Cumming travelled down from Glasgow on an overnight bus to attend.  Years later I'd find child porn on his computer and get him arrested.
12) Maggie Thatcher became the longest-serving PM. This was not a source of celebration where I lived as her policies had seen the area go from almost 100% employment to being an unemployment black spot, a state it remains in to this day.
13) The prince of Wales narrowly avoids death in an avalanche.
14) Two soldiers are beaten to death when they make a wrong turn and end up at the funeral of an IRA member by accident. A lot of soldiers died this year in IRA attacks, mostly funded by donations from the US. The allowing of fundraising for terrorist organisations is a bone of contention in relations between the two nations but will continue until the September the 11th attacks.
15) The Poll Tax is announced. It came in force in Scotland a year before it did in England & Wales. A protest against it was the first political rally I attended. The introduction of the Poll Tax would lead to the end of Thatcher's time in office.
16) Warnings of an imminent recession about to strike the world start coming from economists.
17) Roy Kinnear dies after falling off a horse during the filming of a follow-up to The Three Muskateers.
18) Civilian ownership of semi-automatic weapons by private citizens is banned (although the law doesn't come into effect until Jan of 1989), following the Hungerford Massacre where Michael Ryan shot 16 people the previous year.
19) A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking is published.
20) Kenneth Williams of Carry On... fame dies.
21) Perestroika marks the end for the Soviet Union. It will collapse shortly after.
22) The SAS guns down 3 members of the IRA planning a bombing campaign. The IRA would complain this was unfair, but despite years of court cases, no one really listened to them until the families of the dead took the case to the European Court of Human Rights who ruled against the UK. The government of the day said they would ignore the judgement and refuse to pay the fines. This would be a rare case of me agreeing with John Major (Maggie Thatchers replacement).
23) Oliver North becomes world-famous leading to Ronald Reagan being unable to remember anything.
24) The Soviet Union announces it is withdrawing from Afghanistan. The withdrawal took place shortly after the release of Rambo 3 leading to many a wry comment during reviews.
25) Scientists start to warn of the climate change brought on by global warming. To this day idiots continue to believe this just means the planet getting warmer. Climate change would have been a better name, but they'd have still found ways to pretend it isn't happening.

[ER]

You mentioned the depressing saga of the IRA in the eighties, and you know what surprised me on my most recent trip to Ireland is how the young generation in the Republic are beginning to idolize the IRA (again?) after about a generation of it being on the outs amid a stronger economy and a sense it failed after doing evil things. I think right now economic conditions among some classes in Ireland, combined with some deep resentment of immigration, is making the idea of asserting some form of dominance attractive, and that's scary. In fact, I have a cousin over there I really do not like who has a group of friends (I resist calling it what it is...a gang) who openly wear '70s and '80s IRA tattoos and symbols and come right out and advocate the group's tired old rhetoric, and that's dismal and scary. I don't think the Republic will ever quite be what Northern Ireland has been, but the fantasy brewing there about the IRA being freedom fighters sticking up for the way the nation should be....that's like watching neo-Nazism come back.

[Alex]

You mentioned the depressing saga of the IRA in the eighties, and you know what surprised me on my most recent trip to Ireland is how the young generation in the Republic are beginning to idolize the IRA (again?) after about a generation of it being on the outs amid a stronger economy and a sense it failed after doing evil things. I think right now economic conditions among some classes in Ireland, combined with some deep resentment of immigration, is making the idea of asserting some form of dominance attractive, and that's scary. In fact, I have a cousin over there I really do not like who has a group of friends (I resist calling it what it is...a gang) who openly wear '70s and '80s IRA tattoos and symbols and come right out and advocate the group's tired old rhetoric, and that's dismal and scary. I don't think the Republic will ever quite be what Northern Ireland has been, but the fantasy brewing there about the IRA being freedom fighters sticking up for the way the nation should be....that's like watching neo-Nazism come back.

Sadly, Brexit has created the conditions where rather than just being romanticised, the IRA or something like it could arise again.

[Trevor]

I started mine: a heads up as some of these memories are not good ones and I rarely if ever talk about them but it helps to at least write them down. Thank you, Brother Russell.  


1980s

The 1980s were ten years of change for me, most good, some OK and a few devastating to me personally.

1980: My birth country’s devastating civil war came to an end, Robert Mugabe became the Prime Monster (no spelling mistake) and the once proud country of Rhodesia started a slow but steady decline into the chaos ridden, s**t filled hovel it is today, known as Zimbabwe.

1980: My first year of high school: I went to an English Public School in my home town of Gwelo (now Gweru). This is why people who don’t know me think I’m British if they hear me talk and the time at that school was both a good and bad time: bad in that I was and remain an unusual person (which some people don’t like but others embrace) and good because of the education I received. Too much education, says I.

1980: In school, I was usually called on to operate a 16mm projector as I was shown how to use one at church of all places: I remember getting a laugh from my classmates when I screened a film about the building of Kariba Dam and I showed it in reverse for a few seconds: the scene shown was a huge boulder rolling down a hill.

1980: On holiday in South Africa, I was almost abducted by a pedophile posing as a school inspector at a holiday games area until Dad intervened almost immediately: this is not something I talk about a lot if ever. This dumb ass was lucky that Dad did not lay hands on him because he would have killed the “inspector”. I still see that figure all in black in my nightmares sometimes. I was twelve years old when this happened and it led me not to trust anyone easily ever again and if people I know betray that trust, they are dead to me.

1980: That same year, I was sexually abused by a female member of my family: I have never spoken about that to anyone, even my parents.

1981: I fell in love with Lady Diana Spencer and remain so to this day: I am a blood donor and an organ donor because of her. I still see this gorgeous person in a black evening gown with her smile, her blonde hair glistening in the lights of the cameras and buildings, I still remember swallowing hard and forgetting to breathe for a few minutes until my lungs said “Er, Trevor? We need to speak.”

1981: I came close to killing someone at high school: the school bully who wound up in hospital after bragging to his friends that “he would sort this nerdy guy out” and I nearly kicked him to death. I only stopped kicking him after he quit moving and his shocked friends pulled me off him: I was told later that I was incoherent with rage and that I almost assaulted a teacher which would have gotten me expelled. The scary thing about this is after I did what I did, I went home, did my homework, ate, bathed and went to sleep.

1982: After seeing Raiders of The Lost Ark, I started to believe that a career in movies could be possible for me. I also started to have an interest in the Oscars that year and was really p**sed when John Williams didn’t win an Oscar for Raiders.

1982: My sports house at school won the inter-house sports for the first time in forty years: I will never forget that day when my house – MacDonald – realized that if we just pushed ourselves a little harder, we could win and then the unthinkable happened: we won.

1982: I saw First Blood in my local cinema and remember getting seriously angry when a veteran was treated so badly: my father was a veteran and he was treated well. Then I read David Morrell’s book and went “Whoa”.

1983: I was sent to boarding school in South Africa for a year where I was badly abused by other students as “I was different and not like them at all.” Another dark period in my life which I almost never talk about: that year was terrible but at least the music was nice. I am relieved to say three of my abusers died: one of them in a gruesome car accident where this person was ejected from the car after the initial crash and was crushed by it.

1984: After escaping from that horrible school, I found myself back in my hometown and back at my old school: buried myself in work and managed to pass my exams and helped my house win the interhouse quiz: I still remember walking home from school that night and the night was cold and windy: the song Ghost Town was playing in my memory.

[retrorussell]

2008:
1. Got my current job working for the Veterans Hospital (VA) in Portland.  Things were more than a bit overwhelming for me as I'd never worked in a building with so many floors!  Once I got used to things it was far more relaxed than my last job, that I left in February-- pulling orders at a beverage warehouse on Swan Island.  We didn't have time to take much of breaks or lunches due to how fast we were expected to finish our orders so we had to put snacks on a little basket on our electric pallet jacks and race to complete our orders.  Absolutely brutal.  Much better with this job.  The bus got me near it quickly but if I didn't want to wait for another connection I had to walk up a VERY steep hill to get there.  I was fit enough to do it but it was still exhausting.  Not gonna do that anymore.
2. Still at my apartment, and I had bought a pull-out futon couch for the guest bedroom.  I think this was the year I bought my NEO GEO arcade machine, maybe also my DIG DUG.  I had bought my PHOENIX a year or two prior.  My brother's girlfriend came over and was super-impressed!
3. Cyclone Nargis devastates Nyanmar, killing over 100,000.
4. A fire at Universal Studios Hollywood burns tons of recording material made from over 7 decades.
5. 11 climbers die on K2 (the 2nd highest mountain on Earth).
6. The 2008 Smmer Olympics are in Beijing.  Usian Bolt sets a record in the 100M.
7. The Dow Jones plummets to its largest single day loss in history after bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual (later Chase).
8. President Bush creates a 700 billion treasury fund to purchase failing bank assets.
9. Spotify is launched.
10. Bitcoin is invented.
11. Barack Hussein Obama is the first black person to be elected President of the United States.
12. Israel invades the Gaza Strip after Hamas fired rockets into Israel territory.
13. Famous deaths: Sir Edmund Hillary, Suzanne Pleshette, Heath Ledger, Suharto (Indonesian President), Roy Scheider, Kon Ichikawa, William F. Buckley, Jeff Healey, Anthony Minghella, Paul Scofield, Richard Widmark, Charlton Heston, Eddy Arnold, John Phillip Law, Sydney Pollack, Harvey Korman, Yves Saint Laurent, Bo Diddley, Mel Ferrer, Tim Russert, Stan Winston, George Carlin, Bernie Mac, Isaac Hayes, Don Lafontaine, Bill Melendez, Paul Newman, Earl Palmer, Edie Adams, Studs Terkel, Michael Crichton, Yma Sumac, Paul Benedict, Beverly Garland, Bettie Page, Robert Mulligan, Harold Pinter, Eartha Kitt.
14. THE DARK KNIGHT.  What a great film!  Saw this by myself at the Pioneer Plaza theater downtown.
 Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker was unbelievable.  He got a posthumous Oscar the following year, after his sudden death from accidental medication overdose.  One of my favorite scenes:

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15. Rain storms delay 2 games of the World Series between the Phillies and Rays (Philadelphia wins the series in 5 games).
16. I remember cleaning the T-51 building at work while the Celtics were BLOWING OUT the Lakers in game 6 of the Finals.  I was quite happy.  I hate the Lakers.
17. Other big films of 2008: Cloverfield, Twilight, Mamma Mia!, Pineapple Express, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (ugh), Wall E, Sex And The City, Zach And Miri Make A Porno, Tropic Thunder, In Brouges, Choke, Saw V
18. WOW!!!  The New England Patriots had equaled the Miami Dolphins' feat of a PERFECT season at 16-0.  They got all the way to the Super Bowl against the New York Giants.. and LOST??!!  Are you kidding me??  Not the only time Eli Manning and the Giants would get the better of the Patriots...
19. The Detroit Red Wings beat the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Stanley Cup 4 games to 2.  I remember not wanting either team in it, so I didn't pay much attention.
20. I remember the Western Conference in the NBA being very competitive in 2007-08; Golden State had 48 wins and still didn't make the playoffs!  My Trail Blazers were a mere .500 and their #1 pick in the 2007 draft, Greg Oden (a colossal bust) didn't even play this year.
21. Any good song debuts of 2008?  I'm Yours- Jason Mraz, Use Somebody- Kings Of Leon.  Other hits (meh): I Kissed A Girl- Katy Perry, Viva La Vida- Coldplay, Single Ladies- Beyonce, So What- Pink
22. I remember going to a tavern in Portland with my mom to watch the NFL season opener between my Bills and her Seahawks.  I loved it-- we beat the pants off them!  She was bummed.  The season started off well at 5-1.. and then the wheels came COMPLETELY off as the team went on to miss the playoffs at 7-9.  Such a great start for QB Trent Edwards, but he suffered a gruesome injury after the hot start and was never the same.  That marked 8 straight years without playoffs, which would continue well into the next decade..
23. The awesome BREAKING BAD debuts!

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24. Other debuts: SONS OF ANARCHY, STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS (animated), TRUE BLOOD, THE MENTALIST, GHOST ADVENTURES, STRANGER THINGS, REAL HOUSEWIVES, CHILDRENS HOSPITAL, BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD, BEN 10
25. The Detroit Lions are the first team to go 0-16.  The 2017 Cleveland Browns would match this.

[RCMerchant]

1975
I saw JAWS at the Strand in Paw Paw.
I almost s**t myself.

[ER]

Memories of 1998

1.   Although it’s not a memory, I understand Google came to exist this year. So did Paris Jackson, iMacs, and Viagra, as advertised by none other than actual user Bob Dole.

2.   Bill Clinton denied having “sexual relations with that woman” and I actually believed him, though mostly on the basis that sooner or later, by probability alone, one of the many sordid allegations made against that wily man HAD to eventually be untrue. It became trendy for a while to debate the meaning of “sexual relations” as he defined it, and if he’d have said he didn’t have “sex” with Monica Lewinsky, I’d have agreed with him, but “sexual relations” can cover a lot and most people agreed he did the deed.

3.   A huge ice storm hit New England, and I was supposed to be there, but my roommate said come fast or stay home, so I stayed home. Ice covered anything it could touch and brought down power lines, closing EVERYTHING and sending many students at my university into makeshift shelters for a week. Sadly people died after trying to get warm by running their cars in iced-in garages.

4.   I hated the design of the new twenty dollar bills, because Andrew Jackson looked like he had a blow-dried ‘70s hairdo. I did however dearly love the things that twenties could buy me.

5.   I remember where I was in ’98 when I saw that in Japan, the Yakuza sponsored a suicide help line.


6.   Quebec sought to break off from Canada, and Americans failed to notice how having a large regional concentration of citizens who don’t speak the majority language can be a threat to national cohesion. But then again the whole theory behind diversity is that differences unite, isn’t it?


7.   Typhoon Babs made a mess in the Pacific that year but was such a wussy name I cringed when I heard it, and told my friends if ever I was going to be in one, I’d want it to have a butchy name, like Hurricane Frau Brunhilde.

8.   Big tobacco got smacked with a record fine, and while giving a speech in Kentucky, President Clinton was confronted with a sign that read: “Keep Your Hands Off Are Tobacco.” That’s tellin’ him!


9.   Someone sawed the head off the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen!

10.   I went to Mardi Gras. T’was horrid.


11.   Oprah won a nuisance lawsuit brought on by Texas cattle ranchers who accused her of defaming beef. Exactly how it doesn’t defame beef to subject it to digestion I don’t know.

12.   The Good Friday Agreement let the IRA pretend it was being magnanimous, when it was actually on its last legs, but hey, long may the peace continue.


13.   My grandpa surprised me by driving a third of the way across the country to come visit me in college, and I had a great time showing him everything and everyone. We saw Titanic, and promised to see Saving Private Ryan together that summer, which we did, with him staring at the screen during the D-Day sequence and whispering, “I wish I’d been there.” I know he meant it.

14.   Akira Kurosawa, Flo-Jo, Tammy Wynette, Sonny Bono, Frank Sinatra, Bob Kane, Alan Shepherd, and Phil Hartman died. But on the plus side, so did Pol Pot, and James Earl Ray. Alas Linda McCartney passed as well, which launched a mean joke that had Linda meeting John in the afterlife, and him asking her how with all the women he and Paul had to choose from, they ended up with her and Yoko.


15.   My quiet, gentle friend Karen told me that at age fourteen she’d been abducted at her brother’s baseball game, and raped by men in a van, then thrown out along the side of a gravel road in the woods. It was made worse by the fact one of the men told her he’d “see her again” and none were ever caught. It was probably the worst thing I’d ever heard.

16.   After months of its death throes making headlines, Seinfeld finally went off the air in 1998, while Doctor Quinn Medicine Woman’s cancellation that spring was declared as sexist. However nerds worldwide agreed that when Highlander’s last TV episode aired, it was by then a beheading borne of mercy.


17.   Probably the nicest boy I ever knew fell in love with me at college. He followed me everywhere in a purely non-stalky way, and had the good-natured patience of a saint. He was a virgin. He was sweet. He had the brightest blue eyes. We were the same age but he made me feel older than I was. A person can come to love being loved, even when she’s already in love.

18.   In January a police officer back home tried to jump across an opening on an expressway bridge and fell to his death in the river a couple hundred feet below. Multiple agencies spent five months searching the water for him, before finally locating his remains thirty miles downriver.


19.   A pollster with the university newspaper asked what my favorite movie ever was, and without thinking I said LA Confidential, which surprised me, though it is a masterpiece.

20.   My roommate’s high school friend Ronna admitted she’d been stealing from us and basically all her friends, and blamed her drug addiction. In the future, while part of a gypsy gang that traveled the country stealing and getting high, Ronna overdosed near Virginia Beach.


21.   I was supposed to get a free Windows 98 upgrade when I bought a late-generation Windows 95 laptop, but it never happened, so on a goof I sent Bill Gates a pleading email, and was surprised when I got a reply from customer service at Microsoft, promising to send me a Windows 98 disc, which they did.

22.   I called my high school advisor, a cool semi-closeted gay man I got along with even though I was known to give him the occasional hard time, and he made me laugh by telling me right after I graduated there had been a meeting to figure out what went wrong with me and how they could prevent future (ahem “gifted”) students from letting the school down like I did. I reminded him I was still in the upper 5% of the class, and he said yeah but you were in the running for top honors and they were going to put you in their recruitment pamphlets, showing parents  of perspective students that you got accepted into (a particularly good college), and then you bailed on everything. I enjoyed hearing I messed up the school’s formula, because by senior year I hated that pressure-cooker of a place so much I almost told them that on my eighteenth birthday I moved in with a man, which under Archdiocesan morals and ethics would have gotten me gloriously expelled.

23.   The sweet boy I mentioned took me whale watching in Bar Harbor, Maine, and we saw minke whales and dolphins and hundreds of puffins, and what the guide said may have been a mako shark. The whales came maybe forty feet from the boat and didn’t seem spooked at all. They were amazing to see but I found out that day that the decaying krill caught in a whale’s baleen stinks so bad it’ll make your nose run.


24.   My roommate and I lived a floor above a chain-smoking post-middle-age telemarketer named Ray, who would time coming out of his place to match when we were going down the stairs, so he could “accidentally” brush against us and say excuse me. He pulled it so often we called it “getting Raylested” (i.e. molested) but none of us ever really griped at him for it, he was such a loser, and it was almost funny to watch his less than slick machinations, so we got so we’d mess with him, pretending we were coming downstairs to see if he’d come out to intercept us, which often he would. He was a sleaze, sure, but such were the ‘90s that somehow we laughed off the old pervert’s chutzpah and halfway liked the man.

25.   When I left for several months to do a scary job in another country, my dad told me something that made all the difference in the face of my nervousness: “Remember, you’re a predator.” I know how that sounds, but him telling me that registered and the job went well.

[RCMerchant]

1969

I lived in a a catholic orphange. A nun named Sister Nina used to take me to her room after hours so I could watch Night Gallery .

At the same orphanage my group of kids walked along the rail road tracks to town an see the YELLOW SUBMARINE. On the way back we ran trough a forest fire.

[ER]

Well, I've now done 1994-2000, plus 2006, indulging my parahyperthymesia while going back through my memories, and you know what stuns me most? How recent old times can seem, and how uneventful my life is these days in comparison.

Thanks again for an excuse to time travel, retrorussell....

[retrorussell]

Well, I've now done 1994-2000, plus 2006, indulging my parahyperthymesia while going back through my memories, and you know what stuns me most? How recent old times can seem, and how uneventful my life is these days in comparison.

Thanks again for an excuse to time travel, retrorussell....

You're quite welcome!  This was fun.

[ER]

I wonder if I stringed all these together it could count as an autobiography? 

[RCMerchant]

^ that no one reads. I mean, c'mon, when somebody says their going to write a story of " my life," no one but you will read it, and family members will pretend they did.

[ER]

^ that no one reads. I mean, c'mon, when somebody says their going to write a story of " my life," no one but you will read it, and family members will pretend they did.

And stalkers.

[ER]

Memories of 2001

1.   I was atop a replica of the Eiffel Tower when I remarked that terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center tried to make people fall to their deaths, and from up in the air like that I thought of how terrible that’d be. The date was September 9, 2001.

2.   September 11, 2001 left a jagged psychic scar in everyone. A day as shocking as it was horrible.

3.   I graduated from college with degrees in history and biology that have never been much use to me. My last year on campus felt like an anachronism and I was glad to get out.

4.   After graduation I moved into an 1890s house where other post-students lived, and slept next to a bricked-up fireplace that gave me the creeps. I wasn’t a good fit for the place and didn’t stay long. I guess its nickname “Animal House” should have been a clue.

5.   Wikipedia came into existence, and without it we’d never have known Michael Jackson was born in 1906.

6.   At a party during a weekend festival and fireworks show, I met the man I would marry eight and half years and one toddler later.

7.   George W. Bush was sworn in as President, and in my diary I wrote: “God-help-us-one-and-all!”

8.   Having a job that took me away half the time, I couldn’t see having an apartment that sat empty so often, so I asked my dad if I could use my old bedroom when I was in town. Sometimes when I was home I’d watch my cousin Dana’s two-year-old, Tyler, who made me happy, except the time he threw up in my hair at a Bob Evans restaurant.


9.   A friend’s friend died of a heart defect, and when I went with a group to leave things on his grave, someone said we should try to contact his spirit. I declined to take part but was there when a sort of semi-séance was held in a basement. I don’t have reason to think séances can reach the dead, but I do believe in mass hysteria, and I saw something like that happen when all but one of the participants lost their composure and started wailing like they were on a bad acid trip. It was more disturbing than eerie.


10.   A police shooting set off days of rioting in the county where I lived, but failed to make me understand how burning down your own neighborhood punishes police.

11.   That Halloween my friend Rob dressed up as Charles Manson, and tried to talk me into going with him as Sharon Tate. I quit talking to him for a while over that.

12.   I did not have sex in 2001, the only year between 1995 and 2022 in which this was true, though I wouldn’t either for nearly all of 2002. When you have a brain-condition that makes you focus on your past---um, like I’m doing here---moving beyond loss is particularly difficult.

13.   My buddy Mandy, who was also the person who took me to the séance, introduced me to her nurse friend Melody, who was involved with a doctor and had keys to his office. She asked if we wanted to see something sick-cool left over from a previous medical practice decades ago, then showed us this big sealed jar with what I thought were hundreds of tiny fish floating in it, but it was neonatal foreskins in formaldehyde. I thought it was ghastly, while Mandy and Melody found it funny.

14.   Anthrax was mailed to high-profile targets. Five people died.

15.   The disappearance of Chandra Levy burned across tabloids and ruined the career of Congressman Gary Condit, with whom Levy had been involved.

16.   A Labour victory saw Tony Blair stay on as Prime Minister, but his support of George W. Bush led to him being nicknamed “B-liar.”

17.   Samurai Jack and Star Trek Enterprise were my must-see new shows, while except for Shrek and The Fellowship of the Ring, very little appealed to me on the big screen.

18.   PlayStation fans derided the new Xbox as the Jar Jar of consoles…then came Halo.

19.   Music started into a downward spiral in 2001. Some said my tastes were stuck in the ‘90s, but I enjoyed music from many decades, it’s just that new music sucked.

20.   Rudy Giuliani was Time’s Man of the Year, proving 2001 was a long time ago.

21.   AOL was the most popular site on the world wide web, and I never used it. Friends was the most popular show on TV, and I never watched it. Ashanti’s Foolish was voted best song by a new artist, and I never heard it.

22.   Weekly World News jumped the gun and printed cover photos of Timothy McVeigh’s corpse a month before he died, but redeemed itself when it broke the Bat Boy saga.

23.    The first generation of iPod played songs and that was it, but that was enough to thrill us in tech-lite 2001.

24.   The Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, outraging westerners who somehow didn’t seem to mind the stoning of women and other s**t the Taliban got up to.

25.   Science got some rare good press when a team of international researchers revealed a long-anticipated map of the human genome. Among the DNA they’d studied for the project was that of a woman in my city who died in 2001 at age 112. She was born in 1888, meaning she’d lived in three different centuries!