Through the Past Dorkily: Free Bird

Editor's note: Through the Past Dorkily is a recurring feature that looks back at the embarrassingly dorky diary I kept as a 16-year-old in 1984.

Sunday, February 19, 1984

Whew! Talk about yer close shaves! I drove Mom to Market Basket and when we were leaving, I was backing out of our parking spot and I hit this wicked long station wagon parked beside us. Mom took over and moved our car. Lucky for us, the guy's car wasn't even scratched! Our car has a tiny little scratch, but we both agreed not to tell Dad about it. Close one!

Me and JP stacked all that firewood. Yesterday, we stacked it all out back and today we put the rest in the house. Glad I got that over with.

Well, I know what to say to [cute girl I liked]. I hope I can talk to her before homeroom and I hope she changes her mind!

- The (anxious) Barbarian

Monday, February 20, 1984

Theme song: I'll Wait - Van Halen
 
Top 5 of All Time at Five
1. Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin
2. Won't Get Fooled Again - The Who
3. Free Bird - Lynyrd Skynyrd
4. LA Woman - The Doors
5. Purple Haze - Jimi Hendrix

Well, I talked to [cute girl] this morning and she accepted my apology but she still didn't want to go. Oh, well. No sense getting all depressed about it. I'll just keep pluggin' along!

I got 74 on my Civics test. Not as bad as I thought I'd do - it seems everybody bombed it, too.

I saw Roger Daltrey in "The Comedy of Errors" on PBS and he was pretty good. The show was pretty funny!

Every school in the U.S. had the day off except us. That's beat.  

- The Barbarian

P.S. From now on, I'll have a theme song for the day, up at the top of the page. Nifty, huh?   

Postscript: Ah, the early driving days! I had a couple of little scrapes but thankfully, nothing serious. Good thing I was with my mom instead of my dad. He would have lost his shit.

So the two-pronged plan didn't quite work out. Nice to see I got over it quickly, though. Funny how that happens. One minute, she's all I could think about and the next she's a blip.

At first I thought the day off reference was to MLK Day, but I looked it up and while the holiday had been signed into law in '83, it wasn't first observed until '86. So I have no idea what I'm talking about there.

The Top 5 of All Time list is interesting. No Beatles, but Skynyrd and the Doors? For shame! Ah, screw it, Skynyrd's cool.