Today, for some reason, I’m feeling a bit nostalgic. It’s odd, because I started out watching 7 Seconds Of Love’s “First Drink of the Day” ^[1]. It’s a shockwave video with a band made of monkeys singing the song, with flying beer cans. After that, and I don’t know why, the song “Sky High” by Jigsaw popped into my head, and I can’t get it out. If you don’t remember it, here it is:

Then, I found a listing of the top 100 hits for 1974 ^[2], 1975 ^[3], 1976 ^[4], 1977 ^[5], 1978 ^[6], etc. Actually, they have the Top 100 hits listed from 1960 thru 2005, but I was interested only in those particular years.

Those were my formative years, when I was in middle school. In that time, my family moved from Buffalo to Arcade, the region lived through an ice storm and a couple of snowstorms, and I started growing up. I started noticing chicks. The nation turned 200 years old. Carter bacame president. Hostages were taken, and Nightline started. It was quite a time to be growing up.

As I read through those lists, and look at songs that I liked growing up, I can’t help but think about how things would be different now if I did things differently back then. Where would I be today, if I didn’t look up to people who partied seemingly all the time? What if I had not started drinking? What if I didn’t start smoking? What if I never smoked pot, ate mushrooms, took acid or did lines? What if I had actually studied in school, rather than coasted through? Where would I be today?

Would I be happily married, with children? Would I be far more wealthy than I am? Would I be the owner of a software company, hobnobbing with the likes of Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Neil Ashe, and Shelby Bonnie? Would I be getting into trouble for messing around with options? Would I have been fired from a CEO position, and given a multi-million dollar severance?

Here it is, 30 years later, and I’m finking myself looking back, and wondering what I could have done differnetly, wishing I could go back and do it all over again, to do things differently. It’s a pointless exercise, since in this reality, that’s an impossibility.

So it leaves me only one thing to do: to look forward, and see what I can do differently starting today. Where can I be in 30 years? What will I be doing then? How much money will I have? WIll I be ready to embark on another career at that time, to live out my retirement? I don’t quite know the answers to those questions, but It’ll be interesting to look back at this in thirty years, and see what those answers are.