If you kept a journal or diary as a young person, do yourself a favor and feed it at once into the nearest shredder, wood stove or fireplace. Do not, under any circumstances, open it and begin reading. That way lies madness.
In 1974, when I was a copy boy at the Colorado Springs Sun, George Gladney — then a reporter, now a journalism prof at the University of Wyoming — urged me to begin keeping a journal, and I jotted down my “thoughts,” such as they were, into the mid-1980s. Today I have some 20-odd volumes of my musings, with the emphasis on “odd,” and I recently made the mistake of thumbing through a few to put myself back in the moment so I could write a blog post about a friend’s death.
Apparently the only reason I had any friends at all in college was that I never said aloud any of the stupid shit I wrote down. Or maybe I did and they just kept me around as some sort of science project. The University of Northern Colorado was primarily a teachers’ college, after all, and offered a degree in special ed.
Thank God there were no blogs, Twitter feeds or Facebook pages back then. If my parents or the State had had any idea of what was going on inside that hairy skull of mine, I would’ve spent the past 35 years weaving baskets or pressing license plates instead of annoying my betters in print and online. You think my little one-ring circus is appalling now, you should’ve seen it before I got all the animals mostly housebroken.
Mad Blog Media 
Yes, but consider that 20 years from now none of the inane chatter that clutters up Twitter and the uncountable blogs out there will still be around in hard copy for their authors to peruse and wonder to themselves “What in the HELL was I thinking?”
This unintended consequence of the digital age is, no doubt, a blessing beyond words.
Really, John. I hope to hell all these blog companies don’t do too many permanent backups.
I kept a journal during my junior and senior years of high school, when I thought I was the next budding T.S. Eliot. I read it recently and the embarrassment was profound.
O, Lord. I wish I could say it was because I was saving my wit and wisdom for my cartoons. But since those bore titles like “The Adventures of Loadedman,” “The ‘I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Flunk’ Rag” and (my magnum dopus) “For Sure God Gets High,” it would be a tough sell. The school paper was called the Mirror, but I spent most of my waking hours diving headfirst through the looking-glass.
Youth! Too bad it’s wasted on the young.
Hmmmm. “Loadedman” “…God Gets High”…Patrick, I think I see a pattern developing in the topics of your youthful musings. Did you by any chance, shall we say, “partake”? Did you, in fact, inhale? Or were you completely innocent and instead merely passing along facts as told to you by others who felt not as bound as you by the laws of our state?
When I was an undergrad, the laws of the state (NYS) for a while made simple possession of ditch weed a simple violation with a small fine. Think it was five or ten bucks. Explained that recently to a younger someone who had bought into the draconian laws of the “Just Say No” era and the person was shocked.