Introduction

For 15 years, from ages 18 to 33 (1988 to 2003), I filled various annual planners and date books with to-do lists, poetry, art, and doodles, all part of my analog life. 

In 1999, as I approached thirty, I found myself back in the U.S.A. after three and a half years in Japan, unemployed, and living at home with my parents. 

Yikes. 

To stave off frustration, I embarked on an ambitious project to scan, transcribe, and categorize my accumulation of analog poems, keepsakes, and photos into a memoir. 

By the time I completed my pet project in the summer of 2000, the twentieth century, my twenties, and several promising relationships had come to an unceremonious end. 

On a whim, I took a three-month English teaching job in Shanghai, China. After my contract ended, instead of returning home, I purchased a one-way ticket to Hong Kong. I didn't revisit the lone copy of my book, my floppy disks, my annual planners, or my collection of analog artifacts again, until ... 

It's now 2020. I'm a 50-year-old married father and creative, living in Washington DC, and a global pandemic has shut down the world — it was the perfect time to pop open a bottle of wine and dust off my long-forgotten tome. 

I enjoyed getting lost in the analog age, and the juxtaposition of America’s post-9/11, digitally dominated world gave my work an unexpected patina of cultural relevance. 

I decided to make completing my Gen X memoir my pandemic project. 

I named it GenXiled, added a retro design, separated the editorial wheat from the chaff, and paired each poem with a kindred photograph, artwork, or piece of nostalgic memorabilia. 

Then it sat again — this time for 6 years — as I moved back to Asia: to Bali, where I sit now typing this, fueled by matcha lattes, nostalgia for the past, and coconuts. 

There’s nothing more cliché, or Gen X, than a writer tinkering with a book for thirty years, but here we are. 

Thank you for joining me on my journey to the end of the analog age. I hope you relish traveling back through humanity’s final non-digital days as much as I enjoyed surviving them. 

Seriously, we ran around unsupervised until the streetlights came on (they call that free-range parenting these days); we ate TV dinners and Steak-umms (was that even beef?); people smoked on airplanes; and we couldn’t be bothered to wear seat belts or helmets. 

Given that — and Gen X’s propensity for slacking — it’s a miracle I lived long enough, and found the initiative, to finish this thing. 

Verily, please enjoy.

Gen X fully, 

Michael M. Clements