Journal Journey

My true journal,
which I can never share;
You know it well.
It is concealed through fear.
My true thoughts
which I dare not say;
You've heard them all before
and turned away.
The real journey,
which we all must take;
it's brutal and I'm tired,
but I'm still awake.

Thursday, January 20th
2:31pm

Journal Journies

"The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint."
-Georgia Okeefe

When I was in high school and in the early part of my college career, I wrote the most poetry I have ever written in my life so far. I lived in my mind and was not aware of it really. I didn't have much cause to climb down from my islolated and introspective little cloud at the time. There were things I observed about myself and about the world which I could only convey in a kind of code and that code streamed from me on a daily basis. I believed in it.  But like many things, that well dried up somewhere around my mid twenties, and with the advent of internet and the need to share ideas with the faceless masses, the expression of writing in me had turned itself outwards to an audience, most of whom no blogger will ever meet.

I have decided to start writing in a journal again recently. Even though my handwriting is horribly more psychotic than ever, I feel that I have to get back to a certain place again that does not exist online. More than ever I need to write from a gut level, no matter what comes out or how. I just feel the need these days. The years when I lived life just to write about it, when I believed my journal was a living, breathing thing and amassed two boxes of such testament as raw, disturbing, embarrassing and touching an expose as anything you might find on the shelves of a bookstore are more than likely over. My good friend Noel, who has known me for over twenty years was right when he told me last week that we are different people now. I am different. How surreal time is.

The Journalers

The closeness you share with someone whose journal you read regularly is a very deep one. In high school I read and shared my own journal with at least four different people. At that age, at that time we shared things with each other we might not ever share now. We expressed rawness and vulnerability devoid of the ability to understand that one day these things would no longer seem so immediate, so urgent or so precious in quite the same way. The sharing of these things solidified our bond at a time when were perhaps not yet fully aware of all the things that lay ahead which would shape us, change us forever and drive a wedge between us which is inevitable and as it should be when people grow and evolve.

One day, maybe many years from now, maybe we’ll share our journals again if we still have them. Mine are in about two or so large boxes collecting dust in Francis’ basement. Occasionally when I’m upstate at his house I will journey down there in the early morning, sit in the subterranean air and pour randomly over whatever is closest at hand. Sometimes it’s like reading a novel about someone else’s life, and often it makes me laugh out loud. Sometimes I come upon something profoundly compelling and other times I just can’t deal but those moments have lessened with time. And when I leave those boxes of journals I leave that time behind with a vague lingering of nostalgia and thankfulness for the way in which journal keeping allows me to see the connection between events in my life.

Journal Wierdness

Ever read your old journals? I mean written journals. I have about three boxes worth of journals I kept in high school and college. Lemme tell you, reading that shit is tripped out! I mean there are some details that I don't even remember. I realize that like many teenagers I thought I knew more than I did. I was some kind of scatterbrain man. I was just all over the place. Not too much different than I am now, but now I'm a bit more practical and not such a brat. Not only did I journal write like a maniac. I had friends who would write in my journals, like it was like a special guest appearance or something. We would write all these quotes in the margins that only we knew the relevance of. I think I took over one my friends journals to write my own stuff in and to this day when I open it I think it's his because he still has a bunch of entries in there, poems and stuff. Then there's my entries, lists and observations and math work! I was always getting over someone, messing with somebody else, trying to figure myself out. I was craaazy! I hardly ever wrote about schoolwork or teachers. It was all about relationships. I even wrote down some conversations that I recalled verbatim. That always cracks me up.