I’m still toying with the idea of braiding together forty plus years of diary entries into a memoir. I’d call it, Everything is Forgiven.
The last time I started my diary transcription project, my housemate said he was worried about me. I wasn’t acting myself. That’s because I use my journals as an emotional dumping ground. Apparently, I’d been transcribing a bad patch.
My journals are random, like this blog post. I’ll be in the middle of writing a grocery list and suddenly pose the question.
Why are zombies so scary?
Answer: Because they exist solely to consume.
. . .
2004
It was a cloudless blue day in middle May when Jim West emptied his pockets and stacked his driver’s license, his ATM card and two folded twenty-dollar bills on the ground next to the railroad tracks. It was 4:03 in the afternoon and the train that runs from San Francisco to Old Sacramento was due through Pleasanton at 4:06. Jim West lay down crossways over the tracks and closed his eyes.
That was an opening to a true-ish story I planned to pitch to Salon Magazine. I was going to call it Suicide Month and name May as the month. I’d heard somewhere, maybe working for Suicide Prevention, that May was the time that most people commit suicide. Not December as some might think.
I was chumming.
It pains me to think that I pitched a story about Energy Vampires. I hadn’t heard that term before, so at the time, I was being original. The editor from Salon wrote back with an interest in the story. It was for Halloween. Now I hear that term all the time, like Energy Vampires are a breed. Other-izing. It’s something that I want to be certain to check myself on.
. . .
I’m now reviewing my journal resolutions from January 2009. I wrote them all law of attraction style, in present tense as if they’d already materialized.
1. I’m attracting a lover and best friend who is smart and funny and responsible and a great communicator with a good Velcro effect with me. And he’s HONEST!
15 years later, I’m still on the Match.com merry-go-round. I’ve grown suspicious, or maybe it’s cynical. It’s not like it’s in their best interest to get people paired up and off the site.
In truth, I haven’t been on Match that whole time. I’ve had two relationships since then. I only met one of them on Match.
2. I have great friends who I nourish and energize, and who nourish and energize me.
Mutual Energy feeding.
3. I want to be—correction—I am sincere and compassionate.
Now? I will say, I’m sincere and compassionate. I don’t think I’m that big of a Match.com jerk.
It was clearly a concern back them. I asked myself, how do you tell someone from an online dating site that you’re not interested without being a jerk or a liar?
Answer: Before we meet, I could say, if you don’t feel a connection with me, my preference would be to never hear from you again. How would you like me to handle it if I don’t feel a connection with you?
Now, I just float the F word. Friends. It’s not for everyone, but some of my closest friends and best art collectors are people I’ve met on Match.
. . .
Showing Up
Here it is, January again and time for New Year’s resolutions.
1. I take the necessary steps to get my novel published.
I’ve decided some of the steps include showing up for a year on social media to see what happens. In the past, my attendance has been sporadic at best. I tell myself, if nothing happens, that’s information. There’s something to be said for daring to suck.
2. I publish a blog post every Saturday morning and share it on social media.
This is all an experiment. I don’t know how, or if any of this will be received. Last week I dropped the F-bomb on LinkedIn—twice.
Still, I feel I owe it to the book and myself to take the next steps. I have two more novels in the works, and I owe it to them too. Excerpts have been published from both. One got an award. Writing a novel is a long haul. I want there to be light at the end of the tunnel—correction—there is light at the end of the tunnel.
If I stick to my resolutions, maybe I’ll also have a memoir after everything is said and done.
Happy New Year. I’m wishing us all Peace on Earth. I keep telling myself each time one of us achieves Peace on Earth, we’ve done it. And it moves the needle for us all.
Until next Saturday…