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.
