On Journals

My journals are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I write a little here, a little there, rarely in facts and often so slathered in irony and figurative language that it's nearly impossible to deduce what events (if any) an entry relates. I don't know that I even think in events anymore. (What a pretentious sentiment!) The events are so much less significant than what they represent.

I suppose that's why I don't really "journal," per say.

It's definitely an art form, though. It takes a special eye for detail, a memory that captures what is, to convey day-to-day happenings without prejudice or melodrama. It takes a desire to fulfill the self, without concern for any other reader.

I write for an audience.

I am not so much concerned with facts as I am with truths.

And while you can't have the truth without some facts, nor facts without some truths, they are not the same thing.

This journal (that is, this little red pleather book) has mostly been concerned with facts (or delusions and illusions of facts, but that's a different discussion). It's been about what happened on what day. It reads alternately as boring and pretentious, occasionally both simultaneously.

The entries herein don't mean too terribly much beyond the date they were written because they are not concerned with the truths behind the moments they record.

Now, I suppose I could write down some facts. Stuff I never really set down anywhere else might be good to have on paper.

I don't see too much point in it, though. You'd (the audience I implicitly and explicitly write for) would only have to go through my other "journals" and find the truths that correspond with the facts.

Sounds like great fun, no?

It's all old news anyhow.

After all, check the dates on those older entries. 2008 - 2011? It's a bit of a time lapse, darling. And it's all written down somewhere else anyways, without names or context.

Writing it down in different words, facts without truths, won't make the jigsaw any easier to solve.