Journaling

I’m in the process of re-reading my old journal entries, and I’m surprised at how readable most of them are. And the way they have of recreating for me the exact memories of past events. Any time Rosalie and I have a discussion about when something happened, I can go back and place an exact date on it. Amazing how well they can pull back scenes and people from my life, all the things I thought and did. Maybe too much golf detail, too much about what we ate, what we saw on television, too much weather information, too many dreams, both night and day. But it still reads pretty well. I began keeping a journal in the mid-eighties and have been fairly faithful ever since. I’m somewhat surprised at how often the “woulda-shoulda-coulda” refrain shows up. It seems that I keep shooting golf scores within a discomfort zone, and then say again and again how much better the round could have been. I wonder if anyone besides me will ever read this record of my days. I hope so. It would seem like such a waste if the words just disappeared into someone’s trash. That must be the same fear everyone has about the events of their lives, that the whole damn thing was just some cosmic practical joke, that their lives and the details thereof may get shitcanned after they’re gone.

I found some positive movie reviews, especially the one on Clint Eastwood’s The Unforgiven and another on The Crying Game. In fact, I think I’d like to see The Crying Game again, to see if it really was as good as I thought it was. I also now know for sure how gray and rainy nearly every summer was in western New York. In nearly every summer entry of 1993 I mention either the rain falling or the threat of rain to come.

On the last day of April, 1993, this is what I had to say about the weather: “I think I’ll be glad to get done with April. T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land said, ‘April is the cruelest month.’ I agree, although in western New York we get a whole lot of cruel months, months that just break your heart because you assume they’ll be nicer than they really are, just like a woman that promises with the eyes and then doesn’t deliver, sort of a climatic prick-tease.”