On Keeping Journals

I tried keeping a journal once, but I couldn't do it. Actually it was just a few months ago. It lasted a little while and I was ok about updating it but not great and then sometimes I would go a week with out writing anything and then all of sudden this little exercise in memory building became another chore, something I had to do and I resented it for it because nobody tells me what to do, man. Once it loses the fun aspect, what's the point in continuing?

Another thing that started to bother me about that little notebook was how plain out bad my writing was. There was no flair, or attempts at prose or anything that would compel somebody to publish it fifty years after I die, which, let's be honest, is the only reason I would ever keep a diary in the first place. I became embarrassed by the lazy sentences being attributed to my name, like they were libelous lines written to undermine my good name. That's where this happy refuge came into play because when I write for the internet, even if, and entirely in spite of the fact that nobody reads it, I at least try to write in such a way that I would not be ashamed to one day take credit for it. It's like when you're living alone and all unemployed in your squalid bachelor hole and suddenly shaving doesn't seem so important anymore and if those dishes don't get washed with in the next week there's not going to be anybody to complain and I still have paper plates from that party a few months ago so I should be good for another couple weeks and maybe by then I might be desperate enough to hit up the laundromat too, but we'll play that one by ear. That's what my journal looked like. Sloppy and lazily and unshaven and not something you'd be proud to tell any one about.

Good riddance to that. Now I have you internet, and I'd like to think the quality has upped itself in the interim even if maybe it's more emo than is good for anyone. This blog is fun. I can write whatever I want and I can be as honest as I want to be or don't want to be because sometimes there are secrets that you don't even want to tell yourself, let alone your anonymous internet self who has the advantage of having all that stuff written down for posterity which in the end is the real reason any one keeps a journal. We can't all be Anne Frank, but we do all grow and change as people, usually for the better I hope, though let's keep this value neutral and not judge anybody and just say that journals give you a glimpse of that growing entity that is yourself and it freezes little frames and if you string together enough of those little frames you can piece together this jerky, but charming little stop-motion version of yourself as you were when you felt so compelled to hammer out words on the page, whether the page is electronic or analog or fancy podcasts or however it is you record yourself for posterity.

I want to cheat so bad and just jump ahead in time so that I can read this in that future context where I am older and wiser and handsomer and I can read back with a smile of whimsy at that poor confused kid who didn't have any answers but pretended to anyway and I want to be that future guy who will one day read this and think such distant thoughts. How will he read this? Will he cringe at that sight of this breathless prose and wonder how, or why he ever wrote like that or will he try and sit back and get into the head of the person he was when he wrote this and try and remember what was pushing him and motivating him, or will he look back with some sort of regret and dig out the optimism buried in here and will he hold it up and wonder what ever happened to that boundless faith that something good would come from this? I want to know who I will be when I grow up - a phrase which is quickly losing its meaning as I get closer and closer to this date when I am actually grown up, if I'm not there already which is entirely debatable, but perhaps on another day when we have sunshine on the veranda and a darling pot of bone china full of steaming tea and all the time in the world to define our terms.

So I keep writing these postcards to the future, not expecting a reply though I eagerly await the day when I begin to receive these messages from the past, one day in the far off future when perhaps the robots or Google will rule or maybe we will have discovered peace and harmony or more likely it will look like today but with faster cars and more commercials and I will rediscover these stacks of posts in the back of my figurative Internet closet and I will pour over them and maybe if I'm doing this right that future self, hey man how are you today?, maybe if I'm doing this right by now he'll have a small tear rolling out of one eye, or better yet a great smile and a longing to connect with that young man who shares his name and genes and rugged good looks but only a few of the memories that have made him who he is and so to him I say, I'll keep writing this if you keep reading. Rock on future me.

Jason