| 8.25.00 |
Up From Sloth is three years old. Two weeks ago I resolved to read it from beginning to present. I'm not quite finished - three years is a long read. For a long time I avoided reading the early entries because I didn't like reading about who I appeared to be; I couldn't relate to that person. At times I considered deleting all those files to give the appearance of beginning more maturely. But I didn't. I didn't because what is interesting to me about this journal and online journal keeping is the evolution of it. I want to see how long this public exercise can be sustained and in what ways, of course, it is a record of itself. Also, online record keeping is different than a private journal; not only is it selective, but its' presentation is crisp, clean text at lengths optimized, or not, for clicking through. As I read through the journal, I read it like any other Web page - like the New York Times or Salon or another journal - and I find that I can read several pages before becoming bored or tired. But when I leaf through my private journals, the entries ramble redundantly into indecipherable script and incoherence; I can't stay for long, nor do I return quickly. So when I started reading, the first few months of the journal were difficult as I couldn't relate to how I wrote - or maybe because I could remember and didn't like it. I admit that when I started the journal I wrote under the influence of journals I'd just discovered. Three years ago the journaling community was small enough to be a community. A manageable core of people appeared on diary-l whose journals most others read at least on occasion. I took my cues from them. But too, I had an audience in mind and to that audience I thought my role was to be the comic. And the rest of it is just me, just me and for some reason it's hard sometimes to just accept who I've been. Near the end of the year a more familiar voice began to surface. It showed more frequently, finally taking over upon my return to Seattle the following summer to reflect more of how I currently see myself. And slowly, I realized that the audience is as ephemeral as the energy vapors constituting the page itself, and its memory of an entry, the journal, or me is miniscule. The archives, the entries, each word is, in the end, only precious to me. Now that I've read them, I relish those entries from Korea. The straight reason is that they remind me of the richness of individual history - all the things I've lived that I tend to forget in the blinding present. It's true: The present sometimes commands past and future to fortify its importance and to narrow the range of living. I do feel trapped by the present, often. And reading these entries reminded me of a weave from which the present frays (to paraphrase some nameless else). Revelated again and again as I read: I'm more than just this. That this happened, that I could revisit some old Web page I uploaded onto a server long ago and gain insight from it is exactly the kind of unanticipated promise that makes continuing worthwhile. My private journal is not so linear and I've not experienced the same validation revisiting those back volumes. And keeping the oldest ones up there for you to read too is a way of enforcing self-ownership. Would you reject me or not like me because of what I once was? Now it is the entries that began at my return to Seattle that are painful to read. The boundary, now two years distant, is still proximate to the present and the present is not so easy. But it is getting better. Here are a few entries from the first year that, for whatever reason, jumped out at me: Day in Reality Scene from above Two Years Ejections |
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