I used to keep a diary. Beginning in 1968, about the time I started college, I’d jot down observations, thoughts, reviews, quotations from what I was reading, names of people who interested me, clippings from newspapers, magazines, comic books, my own drawings and doodles, etc., in school exercise books or record books I bought at stationery stores (do those even exist anymore?). Obviously there was nothing unique about this – literate people have been keeping diaries since at least the time of Pliny, and no doubt earlier. Notebooks, journals, scrapbooks, what the British call “commonplace books”, annals, chronicles, boil down to the same thing. There are famous ones – Pepys, Boswell’s Journals (Johnson, his constant subject, kept one too), Tolstoy, Anais Nin, a thousand others. Those diarists are rightly famous, and others have become known because they lived through extraordinary events or in especially harrowing periods, and in some cases their diary is all that’s left of them – Anne Frank, for one. I am not, and I have not. Mine is more of a poor man’s autobiography or auto-history. It’s of no greater interest except as the self-portrait of a sensibility in a particular time and place – the West Coast, mainly, in the late Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. A lot of it I’m not proud of. The person I was then is different from the one I am now, but I can’t deny that there’s also continuity – fundamental change is not something most humans do. I didn’t have a Damascus moment of sudden conversion, either. But I have mended some of my ways.
I recently learned that 14th Century Venetian merchants kept what they called a “zibaldone”, which the article describes as a “strange melange of diary, ledger, doodle pad, and scrapbook”, which pretty well describes what I was doing from 1968 to about 1990, and in fits and starts thereafter. I was keeping a zibaldone without knowing it. In this blog, my plan is to post excerpts from my journals in more or less chronological order. On certain occasions during the period I kept the journals, I’d go back and amend or add to earlier “posts” on a later date, and I’ll do that here, too. I’ve never done anything like this before so it’s a work in progress, and I’m kind of groping my way through it as I get started. It’s a vanity project, for sure, and I’m creating it mostly for my kids, grandkids, descendants, and whoever else might be interested. I reserve the right to censor whatever I deem necessary or desirable, and names of living persons or others may be reduced to initials or otherwise disguised. But I pledge that nothing I will display here was written after the fact (apart from my commentary). These are my thoughts and feelings as they happened in the moment, and as originally set down.
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