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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Thursday, May 19, 2022

I don’t tell stories well but would like to

 

from this week in May, 2007  (I was 62)

 

I don’t tell stories well but would like to

I either meander around the shrubbery

or blow the plot with immediate revelation

of anything relevant with nothing left to tell

I’m not keen enough observing details

of mechanical workings to teach the reader

the mechanism while showing how it works

Too impatient to know too eager to tell

And it takes me a long time to read

the life of another’s seamless fabrication

I inevitably ride some implication

right off the page in a reverie

that reveals the author’s genius

and forces me to pull the beast back on path

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