I don’t write in a journal everyday, but I have accumulated many entries over the past 50+ years beginning in 1966. Some items evolved into longer works. Among the leftovers little pieces survived. I thought a collection of these with a piece culled from the same date in a past year would make an interesting yearbook. The consistencies and inconsistencies of mind, skipping back and forth across time, provide varied perspectives. It is difficult to remember the context of the past we’ve lived; we also make suppositions about times that predate ourselves.

The few alterations from original drafts were to improve clarity. The worst of my work is not included. There remains enough mediocrity and immaturity to make me feel humble and you feel smart. There are also moments of accidental insight and incidental humor.

Author Stephen Crane referred to his little pieces as pills…apparently they were small and somewhat hard to swallow, but good for you.


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Wednesday, March 31, 2021

It is hard to attract our reading attention

 

from this week in March, 2008  (I was 63)

 

It is hard to attract our reading attention

What’s the subject in what form

What does the block of print look like 

How long is it 

Is the language ponderous or just difficult

Will our eyes focus  Will we be captured

or will we feel we’ve read it before why read it again

You can walk the stacks of a library

feel like you’re being attacked

outnumbered by everything you don’t know

take refuge in a few familiar shelves

where even the light seems better

and all the good ideas are not from foreign countries

Travel is always an adventure

It’s where we create the resolve to work at home

if we can overcome the presumption

that we know something worth doing

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