Whither Diaries?

I've never had a diary per se - you know, a little book with a lock that says "My Diary" on it. Not because I thought it was gay or anything - which it is. But because I never had one. No one bought me one. I wouldn't have had the money to buy myself one - not when there were still new comics coming out, anyway.

I remember in the summer of my seventh grade/eighth grade year, I became aware that I could forget my entire life. (That was before, of course, I had a lot of stuff to regret.) So I started making "tape recording" diaries at the ends of tapes of nonsense I recorded, whether it was episodes of television shows (we didn't have a VCR & yes, I would listen to them as though I were watching a repeat) or stupid attempts to be funny that eerily presaged my own dumb attempts at humor on my radio show. (My favorite fake person was a badly-British-accented fellow whose name was Gary Gutslucker. I don't remember if I thought the word was supposed to be dirty or not.)

I have some of those tapes around somewhere - I didn't make more than two weeks' worth, & my life was BORING so they're not special in any way. But they did set a tone: instead of diaries that talked about stuff, I recounted things I did. I had miscalculated the fact that ideas change as experiences change, & that I might not recognize the people I was talking about - not to mention the places I felt I would always remember.

I took this up again some time during college, again making the monstrous error of not elaborating on my ideas, my ambitions, my feelings. Looking over one of these this past summer when I was getting rid of shit because I thought I was moving to another part of the world - "diary entries" which were scrawled in the margins of old notebooks full of class notes - I found deeply important comments like: "Saw Rose today. She said I should seek professional help." I couldn't for the life of me remember who the hell Rose is. Or was. I didn't read much more.

When I first went online & met folks online - 1994, was it? - I wrote lots of emails. Lots of fucking emails. I gathered a day's worth a year or so later & realized, wow hey! They function like a diary! They were more emotional, more confessional, & because I was writing to another person, I had to explain things like my ideas, my thoughts, why I believed what I believed, etc.

Like with the tapes, though, the task of compiling them was just dumb. Also, a hard drive wipe would have erased everything - though so far that hasn't happened. Maybe that's a good thing.

Without explaining a tryst with Usenet & the inevitable trailing off of internet-only friends, I have had less & less "diary-like" opportunities over the past decade, & have never really tried to keep anything like a diary since then. I have been able to talk somewhat about my life on the radio - though that usually gets to be BORING too - & I can still use the email collection as a kind of vague outline of my life's experiences, but the last, worst hope is probably this blog, which I write it every day of the week, usually, & which usually contains nearly nothing about my life. You know, except for days like today.

Which is perfect.