As you may recall from ancient times long past (February) the Beneficiary got me a new embossed leather journal. I've since filled it with a variety of scribblings, many of which I can even read. However, a couple of things have come up.
On the upside, my handwriting is approaching Franz Kafka and Henry David Thoreau levels of incomprehensibility, which at least gives a little visual cachet and weight to the entire enterprise for all that it's utterly unreadable to anyone but me, and occasionally not to me either.
While I was looking up Kafka and Thoreau to find someone's handwriting horrible enough to compare to mine, I ran across examples of other people's journals and drafts of manuscripts and whatnot. These are mostly pretty fucking fancy, with calligraphic writing and stickers and pictures and drawings and different font sizes creatively placed in odd positions and other artiste-level weirdness sprinkled all over their pages.
Maybe that's my problem. I'm not creative enough. So, with that in mind, I stuck a red-letter warning label from my current job onto the page where I am/was writing all this (yes, this is/was a journal entry), the better to creatively express my current status. Nope. Not feeling any more creative. So I drew a double rectangle around it, filled with doodles. Nope. Ah, well, perhaps some other little bit of whimsy from my life will do better. 'Cause as we all know, whimsy is kinda my thing.
Uhmmm……..yeah, well……
The truth is I like looking at journals like that. But consider for a moment, how much real journaling is getting done?
I mean, LOOK at that fucking thing. DAMNED pretty. But that tightly organized? No mistakes, cross-outs, corrections, crowded lines — nothing? That planned? I'm not seeing a free flow of writing here. I mean for crissakes, I lost a pair of scissors twice just trying to get the picture above taped into MY journal one page over from the doodle-decorated red-level warning. I may be wrong, but my feeling is that anyone writing a journal that looks like that is wound WAY too tight to be journaling in the first place. But, each to their own, I guess.
The Beneficiary glanced over at what I was looking at and said, "Oh, THAT'S where they went." I didn't know what she was talking about, so she clarified.
"Scrapbookers," she said. "They used to be everywhere, and now you hardly ever hear anything about them. Looks like they're calling it 'journaling' now."
Bingo. That's who these people are. Maybe me, too, now that I think of it. A creaky old fart carefully gluing little pieces of random trash and notes from his life into artistic shapes onto pages in a book no one will ever see.
You know, this sounds sarcastic, but it isn't: I seriously can't begin to tell you how much that comparison amuses me…
COMPLETELY UNRELATED: The boss bought me a t-shirt to express his astonishment at the fact that they keep paying me every two weeks.
OK, I laughed. But if things keep proceeding smoothly, it's not too long till I'll be wearing that thing 24/7 for real. Maybe then I'll have time to glue twigs and pictures into my journal.
1. All the writing has not resulted in the journal coughing up even so much as a short story, much less a major piece;
2. I sometimes go days at a time without writing a lick in it, mostly because I may be the least disciplined human on earth.
On the upside, my handwriting is approaching Franz Kafka and Henry David Thoreau levels of incomprehensibility, which at least gives a little visual cachet and weight to the entire enterprise for all that it's utterly unreadable to anyone but me, and occasionally not to me either.
 |
| Thoreau -- Theoretical Cursive |
Maybe that's my problem. I'm not creative enough. So, with that in mind, I stuck a red-letter warning label from my current job onto the page where I am/was writing all this (yes, this is/was a journal entry), the better to creatively express my current status. Nope. Not feeling any more creative. So I drew a double rectangle around it, filled with doodles. Nope. Ah, well, perhaps some other little bit of whimsy from my life will do better. 'Cause as we all know, whimsy is kinda my thing.
Uhmmm……..yeah, well……
The truth is I like looking at journals like that. But consider for a moment, how much real journaling is getting done?
I mean, LOOK at that fucking thing. DAMNED pretty. But that tightly organized? No mistakes, cross-outs, corrections, crowded lines — nothing? That planned? I'm not seeing a free flow of writing here. I mean for crissakes, I lost a pair of scissors twice just trying to get the picture above taped into MY journal one page over from the doodle-decorated red-level warning. I may be wrong, but my feeling is that anyone writing a journal that looks like that is wound WAY too tight to be journaling in the first place. But, each to their own, I guess.
The Beneficiary glanced over at what I was looking at and said, "Oh, THAT'S where they went." I didn't know what she was talking about, so she clarified.
"Scrapbookers," she said. "They used to be everywhere, and now you hardly ever hear anything about them. Looks like they're calling it 'journaling' now."
Bingo. That's who these people are. Maybe me, too, now that I think of it. A creaky old fart carefully gluing little pieces of random trash and notes from his life into artistic shapes onto pages in a book no one will ever see.
You know, this sounds sarcastic, but it isn't: I seriously can't begin to tell you how much that comparison amuses me…
COMPLETELY UNRELATED: The boss bought me a t-shirt to express his astonishment at the fact that they keep paying me every two weeks.
OK, I laughed. But if things keep proceeding smoothly, it's not too long till I'll be wearing that thing 24/7 for real. Maybe then I'll have time to glue twigs and pictures into my journal.
When this Berkeley-bred Burner handwrites a journal it's all covered with ... neat handwriting with nearly perfect left margins and an average of two line-outs per three pages. Yet I'm not uncreative, no indeed. I'm the son of a research scientist who was the son of an accountant. Genetics might be destiny after all.
ReplyDelete