Just as I jammed through our negatives over the weekend, I’ve started scanning our horde of memorabilia that we’ve been stockpiling in case of a cultural apocalypse. Seeing it’s time to replenish the supplies I’m getting busy tossing the old moldy stuff to make space for new junk.

The guy on the left is John Wise circa January 1992 and the woman is still pretty recognizable except back then she wasn’t a Mrs. Wise yet, she was Caroline Elisabeth Engelhardt. Little did we know back then that not only would this be Caroline’s first trip to America, first time wearing contact lenses so she could look cool in sunglasses like her hippy boyfriend, we would also end up going through a meat grinder of tumultuous relationship ups and downs before kissing to make up at the end of the year with a trip to Paris to visit EuroDisney for Caroline’s 25th birthday. The year 1992 was certainly memorable with my dad having his second heart attack, my paternal grandfather’s passing, my friend Tom McNamara overdosed on heroin and died in a hedge next to a bank drive-thru, I learned a lot about myself, lived in a peculiar situation loaded with deprivations that are better left forgotten, yet still kind of interesting in how weird it all was, and yet we closed out the year in blissful love.

These moments are being cataloged as such: there’s a category of topics on your right and “moments” is one of them. I’ll be posting stuff and backdating it all so it falls sequentially into my blog, such as this and probably something or other about that night Caroline and I filmed Nirvana in Hanau at a club called Kuba in November 1989 along with other choice fragments of our lives together and before we ever met. From time to time I’ll post something here at the front of my blog drawing attention that I’ve completed a year, maybe with a preview of some of the highlights.

This particular photo was obviously shot in San Francisco and was taken by some merchant who printed it and put it in a keepsake GIANT keychain.