I was trying to go all Marie Kondo on my bookmarks the other night when I came across an Internet Archive link to a fun bit of my past – my very first web page!

Now, this wasn’t the original version (for one thing, it was originally 100% image free!), but this gives you a fair idea of what things were like in the days before easy-to-use blog software like our platform here at WordPress. In fact, this was current to just before I started my current job. Each of those links went to a separate page, coded in HTML (very basically) by yours truly. What was I talking about back then?

Mostly music, if I’m honest. Probably the busiest part of the site, and the one that got me some connection with actual readers, was the album reviews page. Starting when I was in law school (when the page originally went up) I reviewed pretty near every album I got. As you can see from the list of reviews, I was digging into the expanding world of progressive rock, which I’d thought died in the 1970s. I stopped doing those (around 2000, it looks like) because I wound up only being interested in writing about the stuff that was really great or really awful and ignoring the stuff in the middle (which was most of it, after all). It’s the same reason these days that my “Weekly” posts aren’t anywhere near weekly – I really don’t write a review unless I have something to say about a piece of art these days.

Aside from reviews, I had the unmitigated Millennium-fueled gall to put together a list of the “Top 100 Musicals Works of the Twentieth Century.” Holy shit, the audacity! Even though I limited it to stuff I’d actually heard, I still must have been feeling pretty full of myself. These days if I did something similar I’d put “favorites” in the title prominently, just to make clear it was all one guy’s opinion. Digging around the Archive I found the list itself, which I’ll reproduce here for the sake of posterity:

First Suite in E-flat for Band, by Gustav Holst (1911)
Lu Sacre di Pritemps, by Igor Stravinsky (1913)
The Planets, by Gustav Holst (1918)
Firebird Suite, by Igor Stravinsky (1919)
The Pines of Rome, by Ottorino Respighi (1924)
Rhapsody in Blue, by George Gershwin (1924)
Concerto de Aranjeuz, by Joaquin Rodrigo (1939)
Commando March, by Samuel Barber (1943)
Testament of Freedom, by Randall Thompson (1943)
Appalachian Spring Suite, by Aaron Copland (1945)
Symphony # 3, by Aaron Copland (1945)
Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra, by Aaron Copland (1946)
La Fiesta Mexicana, by Owen Reed (1949)
Symphonic Songs for Band, by Robert Russell Bennett (1957)
Time Out, by The Dave Brubeck Quartet (1959)
Kenton’s Christmas, by Stan Kenton (1961)
Symphony #13 (Babi Yar), by Dimitri Shastakovitch (1962)
Elegy for a Young American, by Robert LoPresti (1965)
Variations on a Korean Folk Song, by John Barnes Chance (1965)
Music for Prague 1968, by Karel Husa (1968)
Abbey Road, by The Beatles (1969)
Hot Rats, by Frank Zappa (1969)
In the Court of the Crimson King, an observation by King Crimson (1969)
Tommy, by The Who (1969)
Nursery Cryme, by Genesis (1971)
Pawn Hearts, by Van der Graff Generator (1971)
Storia di un Minuto, by Premiata Forneria Marconi (1971)
Fragile, by Yes (1972)
Close to the Edge, by Yes (1972)
Thick as a Brick, by Jethro Tull (1972)
Brain Salad Surgery, by Emerson, Lake and Palmer (1973)
Dark Side of the Moon, by Pink Floyd (1973)
Octopus, by Gentle Giant (1973)
Quadrophenia, by The Who (1973)
Selling England by the Pound, by Genesis (1973)
Red, by King Crimson (1973)
Relayer, by Yes (1974)
Electromagnets, by The Electromagnets (1975)
Katy Lied, by Steely Dan (1975)
The Rotters Club, by Hatfield and the North (1975)
Wish You Were Here, by Pink Floyd (1975)
Romantic Warrior, by Return to Forever (1976)
Seconds Out, by Genesis (1977)
Briefcase Full of Blues, by The Blues Brothers (1978)
Hemispheres, by Rush (1978)
Just A Game, by Triumph (1978)
Of Queues and Cures, by National Health (1978)
Please Don’t Touch, by Steve Hackett (1978)
UK, by UK (1978)
At Budokan, by Cheap Trick (1979)
Joe’s Garage, by Frank Zappa (1979)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, by Stephen Sondheim (1979)
Discipline, by King Crimson (1981)
Moving Pictures, by Rush (1981)
You Are What You Is, by Frank Zappa (1981)
All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, by Pete Townshend (1981)
The Nightfly, by Donald Fagan (1982)
Under A Blood Red Sky, by U2 (1983)
Grace Under Pressure, by Rush (1984)
Misplaced Childhood, by Marillion (1985)
The Wake, by IQ (1985)
Bring on the Night, by Sting (1986)
Cold Snap, by Albert Collins (1986)
Graceland, by Paul Simon (1986)
Tones, by Eric Johnson (1986)
Symphony #1 (Lord of the Rings), by Johann de Meij (1988)
Vivid, by Living Color (1988)
High Tension Wires, by Steve Morse (1989)
Ah Via Musicom, by Eric Johnson (1990)
Toy Matinee, by Toy Matinee (1990)
Doo Dad, by Webb Wilder (1991)
II, by Animal Logic (1991)
Live At The Apollo, by B.B. King (1991)
The Sky Is Crying, by Stevie Ray Vaughn (1991)
The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, by Frank Zappa (1991)
After Hours, by Gary Moore (1992)
Bring ’em Back Alive, by The Dixie Dregs (1992)
Images and Words, by Dream Theater (1992)
Suffocating the Bloom . . ., by echolyn (1992)
UFO Tofu, by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones (1992)
Blues Summit, by B.B. King (1993)
Deus ex Machina, by Deus ex Machina (1993)
Harbor Lights, by Bruce Hornsby (1993)
Mystic Mile, by Robben Ford and the Blue Line (1993)
Awake, by Dream Theater (1994)
Brave, by Marillion (1995)
Epilog, by Anglagard (1994)
Under the Table and Dreaming, by The Dave Mathews Band (1994)
Afraid of Sunlight, by Marillion (1995)
Alive In America, by Steely Dan (1995)
As The World, by echolyn (1995)
Hot House, by Bruce Hornsby (1995)
The Light, by Spock’s Beard (1995)
Live!, by The Police (1995)
Live Art, by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones (1996)
Blood of the Berry, by Timothy Pure (1997)
more once more, by finneus gauge (1997)
OK Computer, by Radiohead (1997)
Sluggo!, by Mike Keneally and Beer For Dolphins (1997)
Vertu, by Vertu (1999)

You’ll also notice a link to what I called “Random Thoughts,” which was the closest thing I had to a regular blog back then (as you can see, “Random Thoughts Redux” was a blog proper, although it didn’t last long). This wasn’t a regular thing, more of a situation where if something struck me in a certain way I’d get riled up enough to write about it – sports, politics, a little bit of law. What’s completely missing, of course, is any writing about writing itself. I was several years away from starting to write fiction, much less releasing entire books of the stuff.

Other things on the old page were links to a project I did in law school called “Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers,” an attempt to grapple with some practical ethical questions in a different way. In typical lawyerly fashion, it doesn’t provide any hard answers. There were also links to my play-by-email fictional indoor soccer team, Morgantown Mountaineers FC (I think we won a couple of trophies over the years, but I can’t find any evidence of that) and my autocross exploits as Legal Eagle Racing (haltingly making a comeback in the Year of the Plague).

I’m not normally one to wallow in nostalgia. Still, it’s fun to look back at this and think I’ve been on the Internet, feeding the silence on and off for more than two decades. It’s hard to remember what it was like in the days before we all had instant platforms for sharing what we think. Whether that’s a development that’s good or bad, time will still tell.