A while back, revisiting my high school yearbooks in a search for additional first names befitting the times of a story I was revising, I was shocked even appalled to admit how physically ugly so many of my classmates were, not that I was a prime example of emerging manhood. Some even had aspirational birth names, yet our uptight upbringing would be difficult to escape, as I was perceiving. Even those I considered alluring typically fell short in the longer haul.

Physically, at least, some people appear doomed from birth. And just what were their parents thinking when it came to first names like Jethro or Candy?

What if my fiction had delved into that darkness, rather than my idealized escape?

At the least, it was something I might have engaged in my psychological therapy sessions but didn’t. Add to that, my scope of ministry since.

 

WITHOUT MUCH HARD EVIDENCE (meaning journals or perhaps snide notes) to fall back on, my high school years are blurry. As I posted last May, I didn’t start journaling until I graduated from college, even though when I was winding down a summer internship a few weeks before the beginning of my junior year, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper where I was working a pivotal internship called me into his office for a parting chat. He strongly suggested, make that urged, I begin keeping a journal, a practice he found invaluable in life. He also counseled me to change my major from journalism to “something that will expand your mind – we can teach you to write news stories and headlines as part of the job.”

On my return to campus, I did change my major, to political science, along with sizable chunks of literature (Indiana University had both comparative literature and traditional English programs) along with economics. Maybe I should blame Glenn Thompson for much of my wide, maybe overly wide, range of focus since.

My journaling, though, didn’t begin until nearly two years later, after graduation, and then somehow not quite by intention. I just started scribbling during a tempestuous, unanticipated week’s trek in Montana and Utah, which was also my introduction to the Far West.

Now, as I delve into the pages, some of the general impressions I presented in that post need refinement. For one thing, contrary to many of the later years, I had periods in that first decade of making detailed entries daily, rather than week-to-week or so that became common later.

Candidly, as you’ll see, those were some rough times for me.

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Here are the covers for three of the four high school yearbooks from my time there. I do admire the intense draftsmanship of the first, and will admit the last one was mine, pretty much on the fly when the original concept fell apart.

 

 

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I HAD EXPECTED TO FIND my journaling volumes had been pretty well picked over in the drafting of my novels and poems but instead found many entries that remained untouched.

That led to keyboarding entries of flashes and insights before discarding the volumes one-by-one in ceremonial flames. The gleanings will get one final airing as I let go.

Quite simply, I see this as one less burden on my “survivors” after I pass but I do expect to draw heavily on the selected entries in my postings at the Barn this year.

Consider them Spiralbound Memories. Do note that I will be changing the names of some of the characters, in part to respect a bit of their privacy and in part to recognize that they likely saw the events quite differently.

If I had become famous, some unfortunate scholars would likely be poring over my many pedantic, even ghastly, pages of scribbling in personal journals that I’m instead purging. Ceremoniously incinerating, here on the craggy coast, far from my native Midwest, in a pale imitation of a Viking pulling up his ship at the end of a long voyage that landed him or me in what emerged as the mid-Atlantic states and then led, by degrees, to the Pacific Northwest before inching backward and ultimately winding up in this remote island in Maine.

There is, by the way, evidence to argue that Vikings had indeed landed here along Passamaquoddy Bay.

I’m not speaking of my novels and poems, which I do believe need a supportive discovery or rediscovery, but rather my 200-plus volumes of personal journals.

Yipes!

Of course, had I instead become fabulously rich, some poor souls would be tending to these details and making them look brilliant. Vanity, vanity.

Oh, for the dreams, dashed dreams, of youth and a few decades following. I can’t speak for you, but for my part, adulthood has turned out to be quite different from anything I had anticipated.

Trying to understand how it happened is another matter. Even at the time, you might see things and note them but not realize their import. Coming across a detail like that years later can be stunning. What if?

 

MY JOURNALS CULLING is another step in downsizing, one prompted by trying to fit my books and recordings into my new bedroom. At my age, I’m also cognizant of the burden they would place on those who survive me, as the phrase in obituaries goes. Besides, most of my 200-plus volumes haven’t been opened and revisited in years – at least since my novels were drafted and revised. Just what the heck remained in them?

Early on, I had a custom of revisiting the previous year’s notations as part of a Christmas Greetings and New Year’s reflection, but even that fell away sometime around the time of my remarriage. Frankly, everything changed at that point. Everything before became ancient history, abetted by my memory sieve.

One of my goals for the past year was to read through my journals one last time, keyboarding any gleanings that might still be useful and letting go of the rest. For the first dozen-and-a-half years after I graduated from college, my journaling took place in inexpensive spiralbound notebooks, hence the title for the series I’m introducing. The entries cover my moves from Indiana University to Upstate New York, followed by the yoga ashram in the Poconos of Pennsylvania, back to a small rust-belt town in Ohio and then returning to Indiana before leaping to the interior desert of the Pacific Northwest, and then rebounding to a troubled steel town in the Midwest.

There are good reasons I keep seeing myself as a fortunate survivor. We have lived through some wild times.

 

AS I’VE ANNOUNCED, I’ll be drawing heavily on those early entries in the posts here in the coming year. So much has changed in American life in the past half-century, and not just for me. Readers from elsewhere can weigh in as they will.

As for the remaining decades of journals? Please stay tuned before I strike the match.

Having revealed my blogging direction for the coming year, please allow me to fill in some of the background.

As we enter the Barn’s 14^th year, the merry-go-round concept continues, including Tendrils on Tuesdays and Kinisi on Sunday evenings. With our home renovation on pause, you’ll see fewer entries on that project, though one of its consequences will become the main focus over the year. To wit: As I posted last May, I need to downsize my possessions to fit into our new space, meaning collections, and my 200-some volumes of journaling have become a target. Frankly, I hadn’t opened most of those scribblings aka manuscripts in the past decade or two. Was I likely to do so in the next five years or so? Or would they continue to collect dust? As I was saying? Besides, do I want to burden my wife and daughters with one more burden to clean out when I’m no more? Heavens, no.

Setting forth five months after my New Year’s goal of culling those pages, I expected to find that the earliest volumes had been thoroughly mined in drafting my novels and poetry, and that what remained would be embarrassingly sophomoric. Well, many passages were. But there was enough other material I didn’t want to lose, which led to keyboarding those bits before ceremoniously burning the volumes themselves. More on that later in the season.

So far, I’ve gotten through the first decade after my graduation from college. Far more remained from what I had imagined.

As these appear here, perhaps they’ll work along the lines of Ned Rorem’s Paris Journals, though much less scandalously and thoroughly lacking celebrities. Who knows what morbid fascination you might engage.

I’ll try not to add too much context but rather let them pour forth largely unedited. You might feel something like an eavesdropper that way. Some of the identities may, however, be changed to protect the guilty.

With fewer photos here in the coming year, the Barn will be more word-driven, befitting a novelist and poet, but with a funky edge. As a “gentle reminder” I came across last year advised:

“Let life feel a little illegible sometimes. You’re not a quote. You’re not a theme. You’re a page with scribbles, rewrites, margin notes. Let it stay messy. That’s what makes it real.”

Thanks to YouBook Story at Instagram for that inspiration. Let’s see how it fits.

Onward, then!