Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive. Trying not to confuse it, with what you do to survive. In sixty-nine I was twenty-one and I called the road my own. I don't know when that road turned into the road I'm on.
- Jackson Browne, "Running on Empty"
I'm redesigning my website again. I think this will be at least the 8th time I've done it since I launched trescrow.com in 2004. I imagine the sheer fact that I managed to snag my name as a dot com suggests that it is an old site.
The first version was built by making photocollages in Adobe Fireworks and then creating the HTML version of the site in Dreamweaver before uploading the files to an FTP server. It was a long, arduous process, and my website was an absolute disaster from an SEO and page-loading standpoint (none of which really mattered that much in 2004). I mean, I had no idea what I was doing, but I had so much fun building it, and ever since I've been noodling with different ideas, every iteration of the site a perfect encapsulation of my feelings on design, UX, and who I imagined myself to be at the time.
I've switched servers 3 times, and lost many of the files through the years, so there are no perfect screen captures of my site prior to about 2017, but with the new redesign I'm going to make a section where I'll try to recreate the experience of moving through trescrow.com through the years...a kind of history of the web as seen through my eyes.
I imagine this is a project that'll only be interesting to me, but as I get older I recognize the importance of documenting your time on this planet. We change so much through our lives. Friends leave us, pass away, disappear from our lives, and before we know it we don't talk to anyone outside our family who even remembers us before the age of 18.
And the scary part is that, slowly, we're not really sure we remember ourselves either.
When I was in college all my friends were always snapping pictures, but I was always too busy, moving too fast to stop and take any pictures. I didn't even own a camera until I bought one in 2009 before my first son was born. By then I started to realize there might be things I want to document. Over the years, I've made up for lost time, I suppose, stopping for pictures almost daily. There are probably more pictures of me from this year alone than of my first 25 years on this planet combined.
So, I'm going back, trying to piece together the version of me who created a cryptic, image-heavy, totally pointless website in 2004, which featured incidentally, a lot of random pictures of myself and my friends.
I didn't take any of them, of course, but fortunately my friends did.