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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Sunday, November 20, 2022

The longer the story the less I believe

 

From this week in November, 2019   (I was 75)

 

The longer the story the less I believe

particularly if I’m telling it

The certainty we seek in detail

is obscured in patterned perception

related in rhetorical embellishment

Synonymous-ness is what we seek

to explain the inexplicable

What else was like what just happened

what other creature behaves as such

when was it we ever felt like this

In exacting a classification first

is found correspondence then distinction

Immediate constituents are purposefully adjacent

a functional significance in both

similarity and difference

 

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