Journal

I was reading a blog the other day, and it was full of passages from the blogger's journal from years ago. Very deep.

Believe it or not, I've kept a journal since about the time I was 20. I wasn't 100% faithful, didn't write in the journal every day, and a lot of the stuff I wrote over the years was just trivia and nonsense. But whatever - I have more than three decades of it.

I though it would be really interesting to see what I was thinking or doing around July 19 in years gone by. So I pulled out some old journals at random ...

July 19, 1981. Humid, mostly cloudy day. Started to rain in the afternoon. The sky got very dark, and there was thunder in the distance. Skunk was hanging around that night.

July 19, 1983. Was reading a book about discipline. Hmmmm. Weird - never even wrote the name of the book in the journal.

July 19, 1988. Wrote in the journal just after midnight. Worked really hard that day. Went to the driving range in the evening, and shot some golf balls (one of my occasional attempts to become passably good at the game). Felt totally happy.

July 18, 1995 (didn't do any entry on 7/19). Insects don't have a prayer near a praying mantis. That was the name of a newspaper article by Floyd King (great nature write, now passed). I clipped it and pasted it in the journal. "Mantis" comes from a Greek word meaning "prophet."

July 20, 1998 (nothing on 7/19). Went to the town festival. WHOA - Gary Puckett and the Union Gap and the Little River Band were playing. Watched the fireworks.

July 19, 1999. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

July 21, 2002 (nothing on 7/19). Deep summer. Hot. Had a weird dream. Some new president of the USA was gonna move into my house, and there was a long stream of people coming to visit. Civil War General Stonewall Jackson dropped in.

Sat around listening to the latest REM music that evening.

"Diversity reveals genius. Prosperity conceals it." (Horace).

July 17, 2006. Work work work. Decided I need to keep watch on everything with a critical eye.

July 19, 2008. Was reading about a strange epidemic in Tanganyika in 1962. It was a laughing epidemic - people couldn't stop laughing for months. Very weird. Some kind of mass psychosis. People kept laughing to the point where they became physically ill. Decided that the world is a strange place.

Anyway. It's cool looking back. Reminds me that life is ... well, life. And it's a good idea to pay attention to it.