It is another glorious Saturday morning and I am up with the lark (or, at least, the dogs). I've made coffee (instant) and fired up the boilers on the ol' laptop. I now sit at the kitchen table tapping away at the keyboard to write another letter to the world (which, for the most part, is singularly uninterested in reading it). I can see through the bay window beside me, by the faint light of a still-yawning sun, that the world outside is drenched to the bone from two days of heavy, steady rain. There will be no yard work on this day. Grass will not be mowed. Bushes will not be trimmed. And canine leavings will have to remain, um, left.
No, today I will have to turn my attentions to indoor activities. These include (but are not limited to): laundry, vacuuming, dusting, picking-up-and-putting-away, etc. (Frankly, it is the “etc” part that I am worried about.)
One (and by “one”, I mean “me” … in case you didn't pick up on that) never knows quite what to put into these letters to the world, especially since the world tends to view them as something from the same species as junk mail or jury duty summonses. In days gone by I would fill them up with the minutia of the recent past. So, even now I can go back and read an old journal and find out that on the second Tuesday in August in 1988 I had bologna and macaroni-and-cheese for lunch and that I went to Radio Shack to buy a package of 5.25” floppy disks for my Tandy 1000 computer. Historically accurate? You betcha! Interesting? Not on your life!
In retrospect, I wish I'd been more honest in my journals about what I was thinking and/or feeling. However, for most of my life I was seized with the fear that my journal would be read by prying eyes and so I was always cautious about the sort of incendiary content that I put in them. Therefore, I tended not to speak of women that I may have had a crush on at the time, or make keen (and hopefully humorously biting) observations about the people I knew. If I spoke of someone, I tended to speak in code and riddles so that now even I don't know what the heck I was talking about. All's the pity, for that sort of stuff would be much more interesting to read than the collection of mind-numbingly trivial itineraries of excruciating trips through banality. And while it is true that I have proof positive that I paid two dollars and ten cents for a cheeseburger and small fries on the third Monday of September 1986 at the McDonald's at the intersection of Sandy Lake Drive and I-35 in Carrollton, Texas (should the question ever arise), I am beginning to doubt the historical significance of the event. Will future generations care? Will I ever be called upon to produce this tidbit of information in a famous murder trial or for a university study of the eating habits of young yuppies in the 1980s? I am doubtful.
However, about what I was feeling or thinking on that particular day my journal remains frustratingly silent. Today's entry (the one you are reading right now) is not much better in that regard. Even while complaining about the frustrating lack of personal commentary in my old journal entries, I am even now holding the cards of my thoughts and feelings close to my chest and revealing nothing about what is truly going through my mind.
I guess some things never change.
Somewhere In TexasJuly 3, 2010v
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