FLOTSAM

Keeping a personal journal is a lot like dumpster diving or rummaging through yesterday’s trash. Whatever it was that you remember gets a second, last chance. By day’s end the memory will have lost its way. Even if it surfaces later, reconstructed it will have a ‘Made In China’ caveat; consume at your own risk. It’s not like leaping tall buildings again and again; more like stumbling over cracks in the sidewalk. I write because I can; anybody can. When there’s nothing to write about, you make it up. Imagination helps though, and just because it feels good with the writing doesn’t mean it will be worth the reading. 

You can keep a journal with the illusion that someday, someone will want to read it. You learn by the end of the first year that journals really aren’t for publishing or reading, they are for the writing. In early morning and dark of night, I plunge through life at 60 seconds per minute, every minute, every day and it’s the ride of a lifetime. I don’t need to be remembered but I want to leave a trail, like Hansel & Gretel leaving crumbs along the path. I lose track of ups and downs, of turns in the road but my trail of crumbs is evidence; I was there. If I browse the pages and see my own words again, it’s like looking in the mirror. I hear myself change, and sometimes grow, even realize how wrong I could be and ironically, how good it felt. I want to revise stuff that is decades old. It’s not at all what I would write today. I’m not satisfied with either syntax or context but it is what it was and I dare not change a thing. 

This is a new day. Morning is a pleasure because you anticipate both its passing and its possibility. Today will be cool for a change. For the past week my most important function has been to water flowers and vegetables. I’ve been creating storage space in my garage, cutting boards and putting them up against the wall, making shelves, new space for stuff I should probably throw away. The irony is, when friends and family see my creations they like them, think I’m a regular engineer. In fact I spend long stretches of time wondering when the next flash of insight will come. I don’t have a plan, no idea. I start with a piece of wood, find a place where it will fit and begin. When I get one piece of wood fixed in place, I start thinking about the next. What should it look like? How will it go together? Do I need nails, screws, glue, brackets, hangers? Exploration versus preparation; it’s the story of my life. 

Most of this life is hum-drum. Unremarkable experiences go by like telephone poles and mile markers. Most of them aren’t worth remembering but I want to make that decision and I need help. I keep this journal. It gives me the same feeling maybe that moved James Taylor to write; “There’s a song that they sing when they take to the highway; a song when they take to the sea; a song that they sing of their home in the sky; maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep. The singing works just fine for me.”