Bloggin’ It Old School
Posted on | January 14, 2008 at 8:38 pm | 8 Comments
This evening I dug out my old college journal, pretentiously titled The Journal of Gaudium Paine, which was supposed to mean The Journal of Joy and Pain. I had been wanting to uncover it for a long time, with the hopes of maybe occasionally publishing an entry or two from it on this blog when ideas ran dry. I started it on Oct 7, 1980 (when I was 20), and the last entry is from Jan 4th, 1983 (when I was 22). It’s 67 pages long, and I wrote in it pretty regularly for about the first year, then very sporadically afterwards.
Once I started perusing it, I determined it was way too embarrassing to publish on the web, even though in the first entry I declare that There are some things though, that will probably never appear in here. The kinds of things that I would not want other people to discover if they were to read this. Well, these days pretty much all of it falls in that category. It’s full of the immature ramblings of someone who wants to be a writer but doesn’t really know how to write (my oh my, not much changes). Predictably, a large portion of the later entries are fixated on the infatuation I had for a girl, a fellow CU student and sometimes co-worker, and my lazy attempts to woo her. This in spite of the fact that she was living with a guy at the time (her future husband, though I think she eventually divorced him). It’s clear from reading between the lines that I knew the whole thing was doomed, yet I still expended a lot of energy on that relationship for no real return. God, I hope I didn’t come off as a stalker at the time. Janene, if you ever stumble across this, I’m sorry. Sheesh, the things I would tell my younger self if I could just go back in time…
Once I realized things weren’t going to work out on that front, the entries degenerated into depression and weirdness. And lyrics of songs I was trying to write. Here’s a scan of one of the later entries, a stream of consciousness thing that was obviously written while sitting bored in a classroom. I think I was trying to come off as more depressed than I was.
There are quite a number of entries talking about music and my musical tastes, and other people’s musical tastes. Even back then, I felt like an outcast in that area, even though looking back on it now, my tastes were pretty mainstream. The entries stop right before I discovered “New Wave” (in fact, the last non-lyric entry talks about how I’ve suddenly discovered a whole new musical world, but doesn’t elaborate much). It might’ve been interesting to read more of my thoughts on discovering that new world, but alas there are none.
Aside to Greg Sawyer: For some reason, I apparently really didn’t like you much when we were living together in Boulder. There’s a lot of anti-Greg ranting. Sorry, bud. It was important to me then, but it seems pretty silly now.
I wonder who this journal was meant for? I wrote it as if I was writing to some non-me audience, though maybe I was writing to future-me. Did I know future-me would cringe so much? I guess at one point near the end I did let my friend Randy read everything that I had written up to that point, but it doesn’t really have any of his comments. He was probably bored out of his mind.
I will leave you with another quote from the first entry: I don’t know how much day-to-day chronicle junk will be in here – that can get kind of boring.
So, any of you out there got any real old journals/diaries from your youth that you’d like to share? Or are you too embarrassed to even read through them?
Latre.
Comments
8 Responses to “Bloggin’ It Old School”
January 14th, 2008 @ 11:06 pm
I didn’t keep any sort of journal…but beginning I think in junior high school or early high school, there were various attempts at “creative” writing – poetry, mostly. Pretty terrifying. A bare handful of song lyrics from early college days are maybe salvageable (that is: may actually see the light of day if I redo the music) – but I think the main writing I did back then was of two sorts. One, in college I wrote a lot of letters to friends from high school who ended up at other colleges…and then when I transferred from U of Michigan to Madison, to friends at U of M. The other was my friend Larry and I were sort of loosely collaborating in writing “stories” which were really an excuse to sling music-oriented in-jokes back and forth at one another, as well as slag on the foibles of some mutual friends (or non-friends). I went over the longest one of those (entitled “Scrounging for Chemicals”) a couple of years ago, straightening out whatever plot it might have had and expunging a good degree of the sort of humor that 22-year-olds think is clever. (I couldn’t have removed all of it, or there’d've been nothing left…) But yeah: mostly embarrassing.
January 15th, 2008 @ 8:19 am
The reason I have a blog now but never had a journal that was only for me to read is that my innermost thoughts and feelings really aren’t that interesting. The stuff I put on my blog for everyone to read seems to have some entertainment value.
January 15th, 2008 @ 9:26 am
2fs: but beginning I think in junior high school or early high school, there were various attempts at “creative” writing
At the beginning of my journal, I said I was going to attempt putting some stories and such into it, but luckily that never happened. That doesn’t mean I don’t have scads of unfinished stories from that era lying around waiting to be mercifully burned.
January 15th, 2008 @ 9:22 am
Lisa, I’m glad you’ve opened up your blog to comments, and that you’re getting into more topics than just the movies and books. I detect a political bent to your entries lately…
January 15th, 2008 @ 11:13 am
When you let me read your journal I held it as an honor and was committed to not betraying your trust. I wasn’t bored out of my mind, but I must admit that the passing years have rather dimmed my always unreliable memory, and I couldn’t tell you now what I read in your journal. We both kept journals back then, and mine were filled with what sounds like pretty much the same kind of emotional sturm and drangst (drang + angst: see, I can still make up words). I believed then, as young 20-somethings are wont, that our thoughts and feelings committed to the written page would prove immortal; but that only happens if you’re Poe or Byron. A few years ago I re-read some of my old journals… shudder… I may never find the courage to revisit them again.
I have been following your blog for a while now, and am in awe of your writing style and scope of observations. Keep it up, I enjoy reading your work daily.
January 15th, 2008 @ 12:04 pm
Wow, first Greg S and now Randy! Hey dude, where are you these days and where are you working? Reply privately if you wish.
Now we just need Forrest and Peter to comment…
January 15th, 2008 @ 2:51 pm
Sarah Brown has been doing a reading series called Cringe for some time now. Maybe if a bunch of us ever meet up in Paula and John’s neck of the woods, we could all attend one.
January 15th, 2008 @ 2:55 pm
I recently found a cassette tape ‘log’ I made when I was probably about 7 or 8. The wife is very eager to hear it, but personally I think everyone will be better off if the magnetic traces have faded beyond recognition in the subsequent 30 years… in fact, I may even wait another 30 before finding out!