It's gone on far too long. For the better part of my life, I've wanted to keep a daily log of my thoughts and activities - a journal, a diary or whatever you want to call it. My reasons for this have ranged from the purely cathartic: "Daily reflection is essential to living" to the questioningly self-indulgent: "Someday after I pass, someone will find these journals to be so invaluable to humanity that I will instantly become a major societal figure." Regardless of how selfless (or selfish) my reasons are, I should definitely stop thinking about it and start doing it. Obviously I think there is some personal benefit in writing.
When I was four, I wrote my first book. Ha, it wasn't a John-Grisham-caliber novel, but it was a book in the sense that I only knew good books to be. I had spent the day playing with my cousins, and we came back to the townhouse. I was laying supine on the living room floor when my muse found me. I asked my dad for paper, and I wrote a little story about us all playing except I probably wrote all of the dialog in bubbles and not as narration lines. In the end, the "book" was a few pages long with authentic pictures to boot.
Now that I think about it, I don't even know if I knew how to read when I was four. No, I had to know how to read. My mom read to my brother and me everyday, and I read a buch of little kids books with the pictures in them for a reading contest at the library when I was three. It's amazing how my memory fails me. During my first week of kindergarten, the first book that I checked out at the library was a picture book because someone asked me if I knew how to read, and I probably answered no because no one had ever explicitly told me that I knew how to read.
That afternoon, my dad helped me "read" the picture book because I apparently didn't think I knew how to read that book either. It was a green-covered book with green-ink printed pictures. We made up a bunch of stories about the green-outlined boy and his family and even used our own names. That is one of my happiest memories. The next time my kindergarten class took a trip to the school library, I checked out a more mature book and mysteriously could read every word in it.
So back to my first book. Did I write words in it? I must have. Oh, yes, I remember. There were narration lines. It was a happy story. That's how they should be at that age.
In second grade, sometime in the winter, I was sitting in my aunt's office while she saw her patients. I took a sick day from school because I thought I deserved one. Amy and Rachael thought it was so unfair, but I guess I just wanted some maternal attention for once. It wasn't fair fair that they had a mom when I didn't. In retrospect, that was terrible of me. I think I wrote three stories that day, one of them was about a snowman, and another about a flower, and I am forgetting what the third one was about. Anyway, they all ended in tragedy. I showed the snowman one to Pat, my aunt's secretary, and I she was so upset that it didn't have a happy ending. I knew she would be upset and that anyone who read it would protest the ending I had written to it, but it was the ending I wanted. Deep down, I didn't want to change it. The snowman - the hero in the story - ends up melting at the end.
After seeing three of her secretaries express similar reactions, I decided to add what I called the "real" ending, so as to make the reader believe that he or she had been duped, that next time he or she shouldn't be complacent with what they had just read. The "real" ending made the snowman live happily-ever-after. I didn't like it, but the secretaries felt more relieved after I showed it to them.
Writing is a reflection of your feelings. The image can be direct - as in a blatant statement about how much it bothers you that there can't be world peace - or indirect - as in the snowman story. It turns out that my feelings always come out in reflections of things that have happened to me, not in any particular order, but in a way that helps fill out a line between a very first step and a culminating point.
Then in this template, I think my daily entries won't log daily activities at all. My thoughts, as in this posting, will be the bulk of my journal. I can't write for the sake of chronology. My reason for The Journal is this: to find some thought to finish. It's an impossible task, but the more I try, the closer I will be to finishing it. Do I want to? No, because then I would have found the meaning of life, and that is something you only learn in the few seconds before you die.
I deem this entry my Journalist Manifesto, in step with my tradition of writing such manifestos in times of brutal change. I'll toast it with the Socratic dictum: "The unexamined life is not worth living."
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