Working with My 20-Year-Old Self: Birth of The Answer Engine

Working with My 20-Year-Old Self: A Portal through My Archival Records. The Time Machine in My Desk I’ve been staring at this desk drawer for thirty years without really seeing it. Not the physical drawer—that’s changed half a dozen times through moves and upgrades—but what’s been buried underneath the current layer of life. The cables that fit nothing anymore. Receipts from places that don’t exist. The archaeology of right now, piled on top of something that shouldn’t still matter but does. A few months ago, I pulled out a journal from 1996. Folded, creased, the handwriting almost unfamiliar. I was nineteen when I wrote it—an immigrant kid in Florida, no safety net, building a life one bureaucratic form at a time. The words inside weren’t casual diary entries. They were architecture. I’d spend hours hunting through dictionaries for the exact right word, testing phrases, building sentences as if I were constructing a proof of my existence. I expected to cringe. What I found was a voice I’d forgotten I had—raw, precise, unfiltered. And I realized: I can’t write these songs anymore. Not because the memories are gone, but because I’m not that person. I really can’t write songs about clubbing and be out past 7pm anymore. But that nineteen-year-old? I could. I did. And my words were still sitting there, waiting. It is not nostalgia. It is archaeology. I’m providing the voice, the production, and the musical framework. But the story, the perspective, and the raw truth of what it felt like to be nineteen in mid-90s Florida, navigating friendship and desire and substances and silence, belongs to my younger self. On March 5, 2026, I released “Pop A Pill” (Extended Longer Mix). It’s a conversation between two versions of myself, separated by thirty years, united by the same uncompromising need to get the words exactly right. It’s about a night with Justin and John, about pills that might be candy or sound or surrender, about choosing to go south when everyone tells you to go north. Why should you care? Because we all have a desk drawer. We all have a younger self whose voice we’ve edited out of our current narrative. And maybe—just maybe—that voice still has something to teach us about who we were before we learned to be careful. The Archaeology of a Single Night: What I Found When I Stopped Editing Here’s what happened when I opened that 1996 journal: I found a night I’d almost forgotten, written in a handwriting that looked like mine but felt like someone else’s. The entry’s date was in the spring—I can’t remember exactly when, which is part of the point. What I remember is the care I took writing it. I was nineteen. An immigrant kid with no safety net, building a life one bureaucratic form at a time. Every choice had weight. Every night out was a calculated risk against a green card application that could evaporate if I made the wrong move. So when I wrote, I wrote with precision. Hours hunting through a dictionary for the exact word. Not the close one. Not the adequate one. The right one. That night, it was Justin, John, and I. Three writers who spent more time trading sentences than small talk. We’d carved out this weird space where we could be honest about the blurred lines between friendship and desire, about wanting things we didn’t have language for yet. Justin was dark, articulate, and handsome, which made people stop mid-sentence. His mouth was “his greatest love, his grand value”—that’s what I wrote in 1996, and reading it now, I can still see why I spent an hour finding those exact words. He understood the power of saying less. He’d arrive with whatever the night needed—a pill, a sentence, a silence—and hand it over without ceremony. John was different. Earnest, literal, unable to “see the wood for the trees.” He’d try to explain the feeling away, turn mood into argument, translate experience into something manageable. He meant well. But that night, I told him to leave. Not cruelly—just clearly. Because some moments dissolve the second you try to explain them. The journal entry documents what happened next with a precision I can’t access . “Last night with Justin, he arrived with the cure / Handed me candy, I was so sure.” The intimacy in that exchange—the trust it required to accept something without asking what it was—that’s the architecture of the song. Not the substance itself, but the nod of agreement. The choice to stop performing coherence. There’s a line in there that stopped me cold when I read it thirty years later: “Once I considered I could kiss that mouth / But that feeling’s been misplaced now, headed south.” I’d forgotten I ever felt that way about Justin. Not forgetting the attraction exactly, but forgotten how I’d documented its transformation into something else. Companionship. Understanding. A shared vocabulary of silence. This is what I mean when I talk about archaeology instead of nostalgia. I’m not trying to recreate that night. I couldn’t if I wanted to—I really can’t write songs about clubbing and be out past 7pm anymore. But that’s exactly why the journal entries matter. They’re not filtered through the lens of who I became. They’re written by someone who was living it, who spent hours getting the words exactly right because getting them right was proof that my choices—to leave, to start over, to build something from nothing—were correct. The night wasn’t about the pill. It was about the moment Justin learned to “shut up” because “he understands somehow.” When three writers stopped writing and just floated together “on the other side” of language. When going south—descending, refusing improvement, stepping away from the part of yourself that performs—became the only honest direction. That’s the real archaeology here. Not just excavating a memory, but honoring the precision with which they originally documented it. Trusting that the person I was—isolated, deliberate, building proof of my existence one carefully chosen word at a time—knew something about that night that I can never access again. What I found in that desk drawer wasn’t just a story about Justin and John and a night in mid-90s Florida. It was evidence of a voice I’d forgotten I had. Raw, precise, unfiltered. A voice that understands how relationships transform when you stop performing for each other. When the nod becomes more important than the explanation. When you choose less language, not more. That voice wrote “Pop A Pill.” I just provided the music thirty years later. What I’m saying in the Lyrics The Surface Level: The song documents a specific night in mid-90s Florida with three people—you, Justin, and John. On the surface, it’s about taking a pill and experiencing the altered state that follows. What’s Between the Lines The Real Emotional Mechanism: The song isn’t actually about the substance—it’s about consent without explanation. The core of the track is captured in: “No questions asked, just a nod of agreement / To prevent any explanation, any treatment”. This is the relief of not having to narrate your pain into something digestible. The Nod as Everything: The nod becomes the hook because it’s the smallest possible choice that changes everything. It represents crossing a border where you stop translating yourself for other people. Going South When Everyone Says Go North: The metaphor “Going north when I’m heading south” is crucial. North represents improvement, clarity, and being corrected. South is the opposite—lowering the lights, stepping away from the part of yourself that performs coherence. It’s a refusal of the “fix”. What Doesn’t Get Said (And Why That Matters) The lyric deliberately avoids: Naming the substance in clinical terms Moral framing The tidy “and then I learned…” ending That omission is the point—the song is about the moment you choose less language, not more. The people in the story Justin: Dark, articulate, whose mouth was “his greatest love, his grand value”. He arrives with whatever the night needs and hands it over without ceremony. He learned to “shut up” because “he understands somehow”. John: Earnest, literal, unable to “see the wood for the trees”. He tries to explain the feeling away, turning the mood into an argument. You told him to leave that night because some moments dissolve the second you try to explain them. The Transformation: A striking line about Justin says, “Once I considered I could kiss that mouth / But that feeling’s been misplaced now, headed south.” The attraction transformed into companionship, understanding, a shared vocabulary of silence. The Deeper Architecture. This wasn’t just about a night out—it was about when three writers stopped writing and just floated together “on the other side” of language. When going south—descending, refusing improvement, stepping away from performance—became the only honest direction. The song captures relationships transforming when you stop performing for each other, when the nod becomes more important than the explanation. The Golden Rule: The “Double-Dog Dare” of Songwriting. The foundation of this entire project rests on one unbreakable rule: I don’t get to fix my younger self. The journal entries from 1996 had to be used verbatim. No smoothing out the awkward phrases. No updating the perspective for 2026 sensibilities. No apologizing for the rawness. If I spent hours hunting through a dictionary at nineteen to find the exact right word—not the close one, not the adequate one, but the right one—then I have no business “improving” it now. This wasn’t a casual decision. It was the core integrity of the entire Answer Engine project. I call it the “double-dog dare” of songwriting—the challenge I set for myself that made the whole thing feel honest instead of nostalgic. Here’s what you need to understand about those journals: they weren’t the frantic scribbling of someone trying to capture a fleeting moment before it dissolved. They were architecture. I would sit there for hours, working and reworking lines, testing phrases, weighing every word. This was deliberate craft, the writing that builds something permanent. And that care shows now. Three decades later, when I pull out those entries and read them, the prose stands on its own feet. Yes, it comes from an immature mind wrestling with self-discovery, belonging, independence, and often the harder choice. But it reads solid because it was solid—built with intention, one carefully chosen word at a time. Why I Write Like That. Context matters here, and I need to be honest about it. I was nineteen years old, an immigrant building a life in a new country with absolutely no safety net. I was navigating the bureaucratic machinery of securing a green card, staying within the lines, doing everything by the book. There was no family support. No help. No backup plan if I made the wrong move. It was a profoundly lonely time. But it was also formative—a period when every choice carried weight and consequence. One wrong step, one arrest, one bureaucratic flag, and everything I was building could evaporate. So I moved carefully. Deliberately. And I wrote the same way. The journal became more than a record of what was happening. It became proof. Proof that the choices I had made—to leave Northern Ireland, to start over in Florida, to build something from nothing—were correct. The act of writing with such care was itself an act of self-construction. It was me saying, with no one else around to hear it: I am here. I am doing this deliberately. I will not be careless with my life. That’s why I couldn’t edit these entries thirty years later. They weren’t just memories I was looking back on—they were evidence of who I was at that moment, evidence I’d carefully constructed. To change them now would be to invalidate the work I did at nineteen, and the precision I insisted on when precision was all I had. The Palimpsest Effect. So here’s what I created with “Pop A Pill”: a palimpsest. The modern production—the beats, the vocal delivery, the layers of sound—sits atop the original, painstakingly crafted ink of 1996. You can see both layers if you look closely enough. The young immigrant is finding his footing, writing with a dictionary in hand. And the artist I became three decades later, providing the voice and the music but refusing to rewrite the story. The result isn’t just a nostalgic time capsule. It’s not me trying to relive my youth or romanticize the past. It’s something stranger and more honest: a genuine dialogue between two versions of myself, separated by thirty years but united by the same uncompromising commitment to getting the words exactly right. I admit with self-aware humor in the track: “I really can’t write songs about clubbing and be out past 7pm anymore.” And that’s precisely the point. I’m not trying to recreate that experience. I couldn’t if I wanted to. But that nineteen-year-old? I could. I did. And my words were still sitting there in that desk drawer, waiting for someone to trust them enough to use them without “fixing” them. This is the double-dog dare. By refusing to tidy up history, by letting the 1996 voice speak in its own words with all its raw edges intact, I created something that wouldn’t exist any other way. My older self provides the musical framework for stories I would never write now. My younger self provides the unfiltered truth of what it actually felt like to be there. And maybe—just maybe—that combination creates something more honest than either of us could have made alone. “Pop a Pill”… But Make it Musical. The title “Pop A Pill” inevitably carries a certain weight, a provocation rooted in the drug-fueled euphoria of the rave scene. Yet, as one listens, the title reveals itself to be less about a substance and more about a sensory surrender. The track’s central refrain—”Pop a pill as sound we surrender, let’s break it down”—repositions the “pill” as a metaphor for the rhythm itself. It is a study of how sound can alter consciousness, how a beat can bypass the intellect and strike directly at the visceral. The track captures that specific, hazy euphoria of the late-night dance floor, where the individual dissolves into the collective frequency of the room. More Pages to Turn: The Future of the Answer Engine. “Pop A Pill” is not an isolated event; it is a chapter in a larger archival journey that’s actively unfolding. The Answer Engine project represents something far more ambitious than a single track release—it’s a systematic excavation of three decades of creative documentation, with each song functioning as a portal between the past and the present. The project joins other tracks like “Lost in the Pages,” creating a serialized narrative where each release adds another layer to the story. But this isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s a deliberate exploration of what happens when you refuse to edit history, when you let your younger self speak without the older self censoring or “improving” the message. Looking ahead, the Answer Engine project has several fascinating directions already in development. The archive itself is vast—journals spanning from 1996 through the early 2000s, each filled with that same painstaking attention to language that makes “Pop A Pill” so compelling. Some entries document the rave scene in exquisite detail. Others capture the immigrant experience of building a life from scratch. Still others explore early experiments with digital art and design, back when the internet was still finding its voice. What makes this project exciting is the range of sonic territories it can explore. The 90s weren’t monolithic—the journal entries move from big beat to jungle, from house music’s relentless pulse to quieter moments of introspection. Each musical style offers a different framework for those carefully chosen words from the past. There are also plans to expand beyond pure music releases. The visual component of the Answer Engine project could include digital art pieces that incorporate scanned journal pages, glitch aesthetics, and the graphic experimentation that bridges analog and digital worlds. Think of it as creating a multimedia archive where the words, the music, and the visual elements all work together to document a specific moment in time. The method itself—using archived writing verbatim with no edits—opens up interesting collaborative possibilities. Other artists who kept detailed journals or documentation from specific eras could apply this same “double-dog dare” approach to their own work. It’s a framework that could extend beyond one person’s archive to become a broader movement of radical authenticity in creative work. From a technical standpoint, the production approach will continue to evolve. Each track in the series receives treatment appropriate to its content—the production becomes a way of honoring the emotional truth of the original writing without trying to recreate the sound of the era. It’s a modern production in dialogue with historical content, creating something that couldn’t exist in either time period alone. The Answer Engine is also building a library of sound from the discarded pages of one life, but it’s doing so understanding that these specific experiences—immigration, club culture, the search for identity, the documentation of risk—are universal themes that resonate across generations. The nineteen-year-old writing in 1996 didn’t know he was creating material for a project thirty years later. But that’s precisely what makes it valuable: the writing served its own purpose, and the author had no audience in mind, making it perhaps the most honest form of documentation possible. Future releases will probably explore different aspects of that decade of documentation. Some entries are more introspective, dealing with isolation and the immigrant experience. Others are celebratory, capturing moments of connection and discovery. The range of emotional territory in the archive is considerable, and each piece deserves its own musical treatment, its own approach to production. There’s also the question of how to present this work to audiences who increasingly consume music and content in fragmented ways. The serialized nature of the project lends itself to episodic releases—each track functions as both a standalone piece and as part of a larger narrative. The challenge is maintaining the documentary integrity of the source material while creating music that works on its own terms, that doesn’t require extensive context to appreciate. What’s particularly exciting about the future of this project is how it positions itself at the intersection of several trends: the renewed interest in 90s culture, the ongoing conversation about authenticity in art, the exploration of how AI and archival work intersect, and the ways technology allows us to have genuine dialogues across time with our former selves. The Answer Engine isn’t just documenting the past—it’s actively creating new work that couldn’t exist without both the historical source material and the modern production capabilities. The next phase will also involve deeper dives into specific themes within the archive. There are entire sequences about the process of building a design business as an immigrant. There are extended meditations on specific nights, specific relationships, specific moments of transformation. Each of these could become its own musical piece, its own chapter in the larger story. Ultimately, the Answer Engine project is building toward something unprecedented: a comprehensive musical documentation of a specific decade in one person’s life, told entirely through their own contemporaneous words, but given voice and production by their future self. It’s an autobiography, but it’s also archaeology. It’s music, but it’s also a documentary. And it’s all built on one simple, uncompromising rule: use the archive exactly as you find it, or don’t use it at all. The ghosts of the 90s are returning to the digital sunlight of the present. They are returning not to be sanitized or made palatable, but to speak their truth exactly as they experienced it. And in that truth—raw, unedited, sometimes uncomfortable—there’s something valuable that transcends the specific details of one person’s story. Closing Thought: Why We Should All Listen to Our Younger Selves There is a profound bravery in letting your unfiltered past speak to your present. We spend so much of our lives refining our image, curating our histories, and editing our memories. This project reminds us that our younger selves—in all their neon-soaked, loud, and unpolished glory—still have something to say. Perhaps the most radical thing we can do is stop trying to “fix” who we were and, instead, start dancing to the rhythm of who we used to be. But let’s push further into why this matters now, in 2026, when the distance between our lived experience and our documented selves has never been more fraught with contradiction. We live in an age of unprecedented documentation. Every meal photographed, every thought threaded, every moment potentially archived. Yet paradoxically, we may be creating less authentic historical records than at any point in human history. The curation happens in real time now—the filter applied before the shutter clicks, the caption workshopped before the post goes live, the entire performance optimized for an audience that exists before the experience itself. The 1996 journal entries at the heart of “Pop A Pill” were written with painstaking care, yes, but they were written for an audience of one: the person doing the writing. That singularity of purpose created something that can’t be replicated in our current moment, where the theoretical audience is always already present, always already shaping what gets said and how. This is what makes the Answer Engine project more than personal nostalgia—it’s a structural critique of how we relate to our own stories. When the nineteen-year-old immigrant sat with his dictionaries, testing words against each other, he was building something durable, not because he knew it would last, but because the act of building, it was the point. The documentation was the experience, not a representation of it. Compare that to how we document now. We experience something, then immediately translate it into its social media form. The translation becomes an artifact. The thing itself—the unmediated moment—vanishes almost instantly, replaced by its performance. We’re left with vast archives of carefully constructed moments that tell us remarkably little about what it actually felt like to be alive at a specific time. What I have done by refusing to edit those journal entries is to preserve that vanishing quality—the texture of consciousness in a specific moment, captured with all its contradictions intact. The entries don’t resolve into clean narratives. They don’t offer redemption arcs. They document risk without framing it as a learning experience. They describe pleasure without apologizing for it. They exist in a moral register that refuses both celebration and condemnation, opting instead for something more valuable: accuracy. This creates a peculiar time travel. When you hear those words—written in 1996, spoken in 2026—you’re not hearing a reconstruction of the past. You’re hearing the past speaking in its own voice, unedited, contacting the present on its own terms. The production provides the bridge, but the words themselves arrive intact, carrying the full weight of their original context. There’s a political dimension to this worth articulating. In an era where institutions increasingly pressure individuals to disavow or apologize for earlier versions of themselves, where the standard move is to demonstrate how much you’ve “grown” by repudiating who you were; this project offers a different model. It says: I was this person. I chose these words with care. I won’t pretend I wasn’t, and I won’t rewrite history to make my past self more palatable to contemporary sensibilities. That’s not a refusal to grow or change—it’s a refusal to erase. My older self and my younger self are both allowed to exist without one invalidating the other. The dialogue between them is genuine because neither voice is being ventriloquized. The nineteen-year-old isn’t being used as a prop to show how far the artist has come. I’m being allowed to speak because what I said then still has value on its own terms. This matters for how we think about artistic development more broadly. The standard narrative is linear—you start rough and get refined, you begin naive and achieve sophistication; you evolve from raw talent to mature artistry. But that model obscures something important: sometimes your younger self has access to truths that your older self has lost. Sometimes the unguarded directness of nineteen carries knowledge that fifty can no longer access. The immigrant kid writing about club culture with dictionary-tested precision understood something about language as survival that can’t be recaptured later when survival is no longer the primary concern. The care I took wasn’t precious or academic. It was existential. Getting the words right meant building a self that could exist in a new country, a new language, a new life. That urgency creates a different writing than comfort ever could. So when we listen to “Pop A Pill,” we’re not just hearing a song about 90s club culture—we’re hearing evidence of a specific attention that only exists under specific conditions. The attention you can only pay when you’re building yourself from scratch, when language isn’t decoration but architecture, when every word choice is a choice about who you’re going to become. The project also raises questions about authenticity that extend beyond individual biographies. In an age of AI-generated content, deepfakes, and algorithmic manipulation, the handwritten journal entry from 1996 becomes almost forensically valuable. Its proof of presence, proof of deliberation, proof that a specific consciousness existed at a specific moment and chose these specific words. The ink on paper becomes authentication in a way that no digital native document can match. This isn’t Luddite nostalgia for analog forms—it’s recognition that different technologies of documentation create different relationships to truth. The permanence of pen on paper meant that the younger me couldn’t workshop infinite drafts, couldn’t A/B test phrasing, and couldn’t see how the entry would perform before committing to it. The finality of the medium created a unique relationship to the act of writing. By preserving that writing intact and setting it to contemporary production, the Answer Engine creates something genuinely new: a hybrid form that belongs fully to neither era but speaks to both. It’s not revival, not recreation, not remix—it’s genuine dialogue across time, made possible only by refusing to smooth out the differences between then and now. For other artists sitting on their own archives—journals, recordings, photographs, sketches—this project offers both permission and challenge. Permission to use your past without apologizing for it. Challenge to do so with absolute fidelity to what was actually there, rather than what you wish had been there or what would be easier to explain now. The double-dog dare at the heart of the Answer Engine—use the archive exactly as you find it or don’t use it at all—is harder than it sounds. It requires giving up control, giving up the ability to make yourself look better in retrospect, giving up the protective distance that comes from being able to say “I was young, I didn’t know better; that’s not who I am now.” But what you gain is something irreplaceable: genuine contact with who you actually were, not who you’ve convinced yourself you were. And in that contact, in that refusal to edit or improve or sanitize, there’s a kind of respect for your past self that our culture rarely encourages. Not the respect of agreement—you don’t have to endorse everything your younger self did—but the respect of acknowledgment. You were real. Your choices were real. Your words meant something then, and they can still mean something now, with no need to be updated or apologized for. The closing image of dancing to the rhythm of who you used to be isn’t metaphorical—it’s the literal structure of this music. The beat comes from now; the words come from then, and the synthesis creates movement. Not backward into nostalgia, not forward into disavowal, but a lateral move into a space where past and present can occupy the same floor, the same track, the same moment of listening. That’s where the real bravery lives—not in the individual choice to use unedited archival material, but in the implicit argument that we’re all impoverished when we cut ourselves off from our former selves, when we treat our pasts as something to be managed rather than something to be known. This archive is not just my personal history. It is evidence that we’re all multiple people across time, and we lose something essential when we insist on too much coherence, too much narrative tidiness, and too much retrospective wisdom. Sometimes the most honest thing you can do is let nineteen speak without fifty explaining what it all meant. Sometimes the gift you give your younger self is exactly this: I won’t improve you. I won’t apologize to you. I’ll let you say what you said, how you said it, and trust that it was true enough then to still be true now. That’s not just a method for making music. It’s a model for being human across time.