I was making some half hearted, sad attempt at cleaning up my inbox tonight. I have ~19,000 emails in the gmail acct. I created back in 06 (WHEN I MORONICALLY DID NOT USE MY REAL NAME), and, with great joy, I found myself confronted with some emails I exchanged with a former boss I had back in 08 when I got fired from my columnist position. 

It's not something I've thought about in a long time, but something I feel is relatively ahead of its time in terms of being obliterated for a poor choice of words.

When I was in senior year of high school I was selected to write a weekly column for a community/local newspaper. There was no topic, no thesis, no real editorial, I simply had to write a page of double spaced text each week and send out. I was really good at it. I had fans. My mayor wrote to me once when I wrote a column about the concept of death and sort of the avoidance we have culturally of admitting we're all two thoughts away from an existential crisis, and about my grandparents dying. 

But, when I was 19 and going through some hard times, I wrote a really angry, politically motivated column about things I didn't really understand and had no business putting in front of an audience of several thousand people. 

I made a statement to the effect of "This is the Vietnam generations' fault", or something of the sort. Note, this was peak George Bush era, pre-Obama's election. I had grown to feel sort of invulnerable in my position after being lauded so often, and so I said some incredibly, powerfully hateful things about people that I didn't understand, that I then defended bitterly. 

And my boss fired the living shit out of me. He himself was a Vietnam veteran, who had grown complacent with my columns being very light, fluffy, humorous things with occasional dips into depression, but I had never sent in anything like this, so he didn't read it. He didn't even scan through it. When it hit print, he fielded phone calls for days. Days and days and days about the things I said, and he unceremoniously dropped me from publication. Denied me the chance to apologize, which I wouldn't have sincerely done in the first place, and told me we had a good run, have a good life, don't contact me again. 

I was, of course, livid at the time, but reading through those emails now, as I've just done, is sort of a harrowing experience. 

Regardless of your feelings on the "social media purges", "getting canceled", or whatever you want to call them, that seem to happen every so often today (Chris Matthews just bit it for both saying horrible things and being a vague sexual predator), I had the startling realization that had this occurred today, or perhaps in a larger market and in a different newspaper, there's a very real chance that the things I said would have had serious, life-altering consequences. Like, you're canceled. 

I made these pathetic, grating, whiny passes at my editor who instead of replying to me as I deserved, an obnoxious 19 year old bully, simply told me to enjoy my college years and to leave the newspaper behind. I, naturally, did not enjoy my college years, mostly on purpose, but that's beside the point. 

Reading that column now-- I don't know. I am sorry for what I said. It was ignorant, and I deserved to be fired. If not for that, than for my ever present comma splices. What I'm most disappointed about now is that I never did get a chance to apologize. I was ripped from the paper and never mentioned again. I had some people write in to my editor even, in an incredibly pathetic show of power. Those people just saw me say something gross, and then go away. That was it. The end. 

I really wish now that I would have taken a second to show that column to someone, to have somebody point out to me the things I was saying, and to take some responsibility for myself. But I didn't.

The only thing I really am grateful for is that it was only a small township that saw me showing my ass, making a fool out of myself. Only a boss no one now knows I had, and columns that have long since been purged from the world forever, never to be read again by anyone at any time. I guess at the end of the day, I'm grateful that the only consequence I really faced was having to realize I cost myself the one thing I've always wanted since-- to be paid to write. Is that fair? I don't know. I'd prefer it to losing my career. Or a hypothetical family, or the ability to show my face in public. I'm lucky I got what I got. I'm glad that it wasn't worse.

Maybe someday I'll get it again.