THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A JOURNAL AND A DIARY I find it interesting what people have to say or ask about some of the things I write in my postings. Some are genuine and some…not so much. Regardless of that the responses generally come in the form of a private e-mail these days rather than a public statement or question and some simply wait until they see me personally, either way it’s all good for me. There is very little in the way of a common connection for all of the statements and questions except for possibly one or two things. Many start out with something like “I’ve known you since DIRT was invented but I didn’t know (FILL IN THE BLANK HERE) about you…” which is only partly true. Very few still living have known me all of my life and even members of my own family haven’t really known me well (more on that later) during that period of time. The vast majority of you never even set eyes on me until 1968 or after that. I often get some version of “I knew you painted, drew, took pictures (whatever) but didn’t know you wrote” or “had Cerebral Palsy” etc. Similarly to the AMEX Black Card…anonymity has its privileges. Sometimes the things people don’t know about you allow you to stay under the radar and lead a normal life without someone feeling sorry for you unnecessarily and the writing can be judged on its own merits not because I would incorrectly be perceived as a “handicapped” person, which leads me to the title of this little trip down memory lane (or what there is left of it.) Someone has recently asked me (more than once) when did I start writing. The simple quick answer is…as soon as I learned how to write. I won the first of many writing contests in the second grade when I took State. I have since written articles and stories for more than two dozen publications and spoken or lectured at more places than I can imagine at one point or another in my life and I have two books still battling to get published as we speak. Like so many of us I started out with one of those spiral bound notebooks we always bought a bunch of at “Back to School” time or those black and white speckled “Composition” notebooks and kept them in the back of my binder to make notes about things that interested me and I didn’t want to forget or just wanted to find out more about. I would doodle from time to time about things that may or may not become a full on drawing or painting later and so on. Every now and then I would jot down the germ of an idea for a class project I was (more or less) supposed to be working on. I’ll confess right here and now…I seldom wrote anything to completion until no more than forty-eight hours before it was due, I liked the pressure…I know, I’m a sick fuck. (The fact that I never got anything less than a B is more embarrassing than ego boost…believe me) I continued on that way until college where, for some unknown reason, I felt the need to minimize what I carried around. So I went to an 8.5 X 5.5 version of the notebooks I had been using but still filled them with the random shit I always wrote. They were then (and still are), by definition, journals. I wouldn’t write a “diary” until several years later when I was going through my divorce with my first wife and there are major differences between “journals” and “Diaries”. Let me explain: A Diary is little more than a Stone Age Facebook . You’re likely to record such Earth shattering experiences as “Had a Chef Salad at Village Inn for lunch today…Yummy!” or fill it with teenage angst (regardless of our age) or outrage, not to mention semi-humorous social commentary. Something like “I saw Johnny kissing Sissy under the bleachers today, what a laugh!” or “I wasn’t allowed to go to the movies with Tommy because Mom & Dad said I was too young ”. As we grow older you write about how you weren’t allowed into the VIP section of some bar or nightclub last night even though you were the best looking person in the place, bought all the trendy drinks to the point you puked your guts out the next morning or…well…you get the picture In a Journal you’re more likely to record things like “I was driving down PCH through Big Sur yesterday and I stopped along the east side of the road where a great restaurant called Christina Mulevey’s used to be years ago. It’s, literally, just a stone’s throw down the hill from Henry Miller’s property up there on Partington Ridge Rd. I remember having a Chef Salad there a century ago with my parents on our way to…I don’t remember now where we were headed.” Or “I saw John kissing his secretary Sissy in the stairwell today again. I was amazed at how far down her pants his hands were this time.” The rest you can figure out for yourself. Journals help you remember whatever it is you want to remember. Diaries help you vent and discard certain thoughts, deeds and actions then forget them. Blogs, these days, can be a little of both with the boundaries severely blurred and not necessarily by intent. In so many ways we have blurred the edges of every aspect of our life. People do things like humorously refer to some quote they heard in life out of context and not give it a second thought. Things like “Banned in Boston” and yet if you ask them if you liked William S. Burroughs writing they wouldn’t know who you were talking about much less why his book “Naked Lunch” was banned in Boston in 1959 that lead to several obscenity trials for a variety of writers (including Henry Miller) who’s books had been published all over the world for years but couldn’t be published or read in the U.S. until the early sixties when they fought the laws that limited their freedom of speech (gee…where have I heard that recently?). Many of us can’t spell anymore we mis-quote, plagiarize and pontificate about things very few really have a handle on to begin with. Our perception of beauty is based on how much plastic is installed yet we demand people be “real”. We watch reality TV to laugh at how pathetic other people’s lives are and then are the first to raise our hands when they want to do a show about the life you yourself lead thinking no one will laugh at you because you’re different. Trust me I know…riding the short bus doesn’t make you special or different and ego doesn’t compensate for any of that either. In the “Indiana Jones” series of movies Indy was always pulling out his Journal to refer to something or add to it. It was weathered, beaten and had little snippets of things stuffed into it. No matter where he was in the world he had his Journal. I have such journals. I have a shelf or two of them and sometimes, when the opportunity presents itself, I still utilize the information they contain. I also have some diaries as well, almost all of which are still packed away in the deepest confines of a storage shed right now. One day when I have the chance (finally) I will burn the diaries up in a “Bonfire of the Vanities” moment. No one needs to read them anymore…even me. The journals I will keep. The majority of the ones from my youth have long ago been deposited in a landfill somewhere but the ones that do exist still I will keep. Someday there may be a great story to tell from them all but probably not by me. Now I’ve filled in some of the blanks you’ve had good, bad or indifferent. Anything else?