Actually, if you must know, I am 22 yrs old, and I am a single mother without a job, so each of my days are as monotonous as they are pointless, in the productive sense. But you see, for me each of my days is precious, and I count them delicately, as I am dying of cancer, and fear that I may not have much life left within me to live. So to me, spending a few precious moments out in the night air talking about life and death with my dear younger brother, whom I rarely spend any more than a fleeting moment with, obviously holds for me a greater importance than would otherwise be the case for someone who is not staring death in the face. The writing is deliberately vague to demonstrate how easy it is to dismiss such trivial elements in day to day existence, yet once you realise the impermanence of life and of your identity within it, you no longer disregard these moments. I do not write so that I may be esteemed highly (or otherwise, obviously in the case of your dismissive “review”), I write so that I can reflect on the frailty of each passing moment that I wish to savour. I may not live long enough to make any use of my writing, but at least, through writing, I can make use of my life.
Journal, Diary, & Blogging / And Still I Wonder...
I had planned to scribe so many of my thoughts tonight, before I make the final clamber into bed. Now though, under the dim glow of midnight reminiscence, all the words have faded from my mind, and the all-too-familiar sense of dis-ease writhes within me, distending my clarity once again. The ever-present sense of impermanence resonates deep within the deconstructed walls of my senses. Damon wanders in from the darkness, whispering a quick “Hello” in passing as he darts into the bathroom for the nightly pre-sleep rituals of teeth brushing. Quick to emerge, he returns with word of conversings with Holly and proposed plans for tomorrow. A cigarette break sees us venture out into the darkness of the garden, and between us in our deckchairs of contemplation stems a need for redeeming our spiritual clarity, as we stare out into the nightly silence; treebranches contorting and twisting; their leaves left whispering with the passing breaths of insistent winds astir. And now, it’s back to my silent world, with only a lukewarm coffee and the stirring inner hum of ceaseless thoughts to defend me against the battling need for sleep. It may be time to yield, for as the clock, with its every tick tock totting up the score, my eyelids grow heavier all the more. For another day is now filed away in my memory, and still I wonder…
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November 15, 2006
Deleted User
This is very wise. I have written personal tidbits like this before, and yes, the days just feel… empty… Even when they are full with all that they are full with. No matter what you do, you feel as if something is missing. 10 for expression. I really like this.
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Well, I don’t think you’ll really remember that night, unless it is meant as a description of a passle of nights at a particular time in your life (what it was like, every evening, that last year home before you were moved to the hospital…type thing.)If you have 365 pages of nights coming off like this in a diary, not even you are going to read much of it and more than a time or two.It seems more like you are trying to use refined writing to become a refined writer or show you are one, than you are trying to preserve a memory , capture a moment or essence, mark a note that Damon doesn’t brush his teeth for very long , or talk to anyone about things in your head.Distilled, it says, “I was going to write so much good stuff but like night usually does to me, I felt like a hot water bottle with a hole in it that had lost about everything it held.Damon’s still here, he brushes his teeth every night, he was still talking to Holly (in case some day he’s not, let me make sure I get this in here…)just plans, was what he said they talked about, and then we went outside to have cigs,it’s quiet out there if I haven’t said so any other night yet, we still have those deck chairs as I write, I did get all worked up about a way to describe tree branches I thought merited saving, maybe for a poem someday, how they contort and twist and this line, ‘their leaves left whispering with the passing breaths of insistant winds astir” . he went to bed, my coffee cooled, my thoughts kept me awake but I stopped fighting the clock and put all this samo-samo away in my memory”...not much reason to keep a journal , is there?
--Yes. because if you keep it up, a few hours a day, you’ll get better and better at the poetic way you are trying to write like, and then maybe, bored with there being nothing there, you’ll use that better writing, or stronger more ingrained habit of writing daily, to say something with. So don’t quit; it looks like you are prepping yourself up to be a poetic writer (well, obviously, not a humorous one).You’ll see, after you can’t wade through it and can’t wade through it and can’t wade through it, that you need to be telling stuff--day’s occurances, or thoughts and comments on things. Journals people like to keep through generations or in library’s of women’s writings or Westward Movement /Pioneer Days Collections are those where the writer describes how things were done in her time,(Mother always wrings the chicken necks because she has a knack for doing it so swiftly it goes unnoticed as we all talk while we chop onions) or what was going on like in the news or the town, (” A much shorter-than-I expected- him -to- be Cotton Mather preached at our revival”, and/or,”He screams in place of really having anything deep to say,as if to frighten us however he can do it”) and her observations about that. I hate to pass this on to you, but your grandchildren are going to throw this one out.What you seem good for, are those wordy gretting cards in book stores that go a paragraph or two on about the every-day sounding,but richly evoked, setting, poetically, with a black-and-white photo of someone thinking deeply and then say,maybe after the cooling coffee and then the trees twisting, “like dough into pretzels that encircle and embrace though the loops are all now umber all will spring to lively colors with the advent of the cake--- Best wishes on this wonder-filled evening that is dawning with a brand new babe--” .(Whoops! Don’t ryhme--that was awful, wasn’t it?!)There’s quite a market for softly-expressed poetic unrhymed verse that captures in its essence a quiet steady friendship or relationship or sympathy or just points out a well-appreciated sharing of lives or how “I was going to write all this elegant stuff but when I couldn’t I realized silence with you is enough ” That or poetry I see from you, rather than a journal that would keep.It might sound eloquent to you because you are perspiring in constructing it into something so flowery, but even “between us …stems a need for redeeming our spiritual clarity” is just showy verbiage, it doesn’t tell anyone anything they’d like to save,re-read, or even not skim over but savour like “Dandelion Wine.” Now, if you cared to really,really open up, writing that is so honest it’s painful is always good writing.The kind where the Reader thinks,” God, I could have said that, but I never had the guts to go there.” I don’t quite know how to explain it, but I’ll try- I,myself, am terminally ill, so your second sentence made me sit up a little at first,thinking you were going into that.(Dis-ease,ever present sense of impermanence.) But if you are dying too,you didn’t go any further into it.Painfully honest writing might be like, saying that, on government disability you get so little income, you guys have to spend seven hours every day coming up with a way to get through that day, each day coming up with something to pawn, or going to your pastor,something diff every darned day to get enuf to have toilet paper, replace a burned-out light-bulb, gas to get someone who’s feet are so bloated they scare the bejesus out of you to the E. R., butter to go on the cheap, so-called day-old bread you have to buy, paying on the various things coming up daily due at the hock shop or you’ll lose them, that it’s mentally and emotionally exhausting because the fear you experience 7 days a week along with it too just wears you out as much as the struggle; that when you get the few bucks collected, you feel you’ve accomplished so much you never get the rest of life done, making the dental appointments,searching for the missing cat, all the other things people are going to give you queer looks for saying you never have the time to do when they know you don’t work—that’s starting to be honest. Then throwing in that you feel really stupid about smoking so don’t ever tell anyone you do, that you struggle for cigarette money too, and suffer the fear of running out of cigarettes each day too, and know that’s beyond anybody’s sympathy, but there it is, it’s happening—that’s brutal honesty.There are others in that situation who are going to pull the chair in closer to read more, thinking, hey, it’s me!
People can’t help but read that stuff they hide , when they see themselves in all their warts, respecting you big-time for your nerve. So you can get deep and dirty (I mean, actually, get for real, not that you are dirty) and make a readable blog-journal; or you can pick on (out) fascinating aspects of each day instead of melding it all together into a showy nothing of a day each day; try poetry instead; or try for verse on those straight-forward , you’re- my -friend- because -you -are- all- this,or, sometimes -I- think- we- treat- each -other -improperly,-let’s -don’t,greeting cards.Whichever,it can’t hurt you to keep applying your bottom to the seat of a chair and honing your skills and getting in the practice of writing daily, but have your aim be to write something preservable.You aren’t a terrible writer or anything, but “dim glow of midnight reminiscence” and “nightly pre-sleep rituals” and “with its every tick tock totting up the score”, aren’t normal conversational style, and you’ve nothing in there with them to make them worth wasting the paper on--they stand alone in place of revealing anything.Your effort at journaling here reads sort of like reading a school paper asking a student to come up with a different way to say 15 cliches. He does, but how interesting is that paper to most people? It has neither heart nor soul—it’s just practice writing.
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