on the art of journaling

[excerpted from my incredibly suave-looking new journal--the one with quality paper and no lines and leather binding that really intimidates me--the night of 30 January 2005]

"writing is an enticingly dangerous activity. it commits one to the thought, the ideas, the conclusions, the hopes and fears of the fickle moment. it enshrines fluid thought into concrete, unalterable statement, where a moment takes on potentially damning permanence.

"what if? will this moment be one i choose to embrace? or later will i avert my eyes or try to cast it away? will i find it again someday in stunned incredulity and slowly reintroduce it to my discourse? will it shake my my conscious understanding of life? what if it turns into a haunting, eternally smoking gun shattering its way through the comfortable conclusions of careful mental editing? simple details have a way of burning through countless weeks and months iof the painstaking and invisible process of forming my life into an image--a narrative--of my existence.

"this page in a journal could be that manuscript, passed from secret drawer to trenchcoat to microfilm to a secret publisher revealing the dissent and diversity extant underneath the state-sponsored facade of ideological unity. an honest journal becomes a portrait of an unsettling truth: the bickering anarchy of ideas and drives and whims, factions of the proud, noble, whimsical, animal, cynical, confused, grasping, covetous, hopeful, beautiful, mundane, and poetic waxing and waning and manifesting in the discordant din of a thousand interpretations, narratives, declarations, actions and self-definitions.

"one time a kind woman surprised me: her memory was more honest than my journal. she told me of a time i made her laugh three years ago. she decided she wanted to date me.

"one time i had a friend named Sarah--in junior high. we would talk and play games and help with the kids at our church's small group meetings on Wednesday nights. i completed my first outdoor-recreation-style initiative element with her. she moved up to the youth group before i did; by the time i caught up, an awkward gender gap cut off our interaction. by the time i graduated high school, all i thought about was that thick, awkward line that had 'forever' stood between the boys and the girls. i thought she and the others despised me--i wished i was good enough to be her friend.

"it took a year of similar stories--archaeological rediscoveries, a shocking revisionist history of the soul--to wake me up to the life i had once lived without even realizing it. it was a hidden life of stories expunged from my recollective memory with the ruthless thoroughness of a Communist history textbook or George W. Bush's service record. i had not even consciously assimilated these events: their very existence was fundamentally incompatible with the conceptual framework of my existence, so they were cast aside and ignored as exceptions within days or months of living them.

"the human memory is built through recollection, contemplation and integration. i had edited--the proper word perhaps is mangled--the record of my day-to-day existence to fit it into a black and white (more black than white) narrative by dwelling on and rehearsing all of the the things that fit my malcontent, my jealousy.

"recently i have been haunted by a growing wonder: what treasures had i lost to forgetfulness for sheer lack of a record. what pages had been torn from my mental journal, or worse, never been written, on the unconscious charge of nonconformity? behold, the power of ideology: moments of breathtaking beauty lost to the conviction that it was too inconsistent--too heartrendingly good--to be real?"