Journal of Fear and Hope

In the Grip of a Nameless Possession
February 21, 2020

I got this journal for my birthday last year:

My wife wrote a wonderful message, and my daughter drew shapes on the inside-back-cover. After a month or so of hemming and hawing, I finally opened the thing and put pencil to paper. That was an important moment in my life.

I set my goal to write about something good that happened each day, something that made me happy. Which I did. Sometimes I missed a day. Sometimes I missed several. But I filled that journal up last year. Then I kept writing journal entries in digital form.

Today, I reached page 100.

Last year, along with the paper journal and the digital, I wrote a book of poetry (coming soon), an album and a half of songs (Quiet Lions and another coming later this year), a couple of essays, and a short story. I did all that because I had to. If I don't write, I fail. That's my motivation. But I found the strength and dedication by writing something in that Snoopy journal almost every day. I have a journal entry for every day of this year. And since the turn of the decade, I have written something else, usually a few paragraphs in the new story, every single weekday.

I established a habit. That's how you learn anything new, by forcing yourself to do it till you do it automatically. That's how I wrote 25 pages of a new story this year, and that's how I'll finally finish the book I started a decade ago.

Before and After
February 7, 2020

Six years ago, I sat in the cafe of a Barnes and Noble, on my lunch break, and started writing a short story in pencil on loose leaf paper. Slowly, a few paragraphs or sentences at a time, I wrote seventy-five pages. I was just about done with the first draft of the longest thing I’d ever written by hand when my life changed, and my focus shifted away from that story. I was fired from that job, which turned out to be a godsend because I then found the best job I’ve ever had--but it was a scary month of free falling. Then my daughter was born.

The story has been in my notebook and on my mind ever since. I wrote other things, songs, poems, a few stories to accompany that long one in a book. As the years went by--sorry I automatically sang the beginning of this sentence because it’s a line from a Rush song. I’ll start again. In time, the story became a hulking beast I couldn’t face, a snarl of vines I couldn’t untie. But this year, I made the commitment to get it done.

At first, I thought I would pick up a freshly-filled mechanical pencil, write the ending, then transcribe it into type. But reading from the start, I realized the story needed serious rewrites. The beginning, as might be expected, was an unfocused, rambling mess. I had no idea when I began what the story wanted to say, where it wanted to go, who the characters were or how they related to each other. So I started writing, this time with a keyboard.

I knew what would come later in the story, so I was able to set some of that up in the beginning. I knew who the characters were, so I was able to write better dialogue between them. The writing felt good and, most importantly, it was fun. A week or so later, I had a scene that didn’t exist in the first draft, but it had been seeded by what I had done six years ago.

I was having the other half of a conversation that I had started, with myself, in that Barnes and Noble cafe. A lot of what I wrote in the original draft I now recognize as pretty dumb. I wrote a lot of bad prose back then. This is not going to be a case of simple transcription. My characters over explain everything. They’re surprised by things quite obvious in the story. They make stupid decisions. However, when I wrote this mess years before, I thought I was doing a great job. I was proud of it. I guess it’s a sign of growth that I can spot the mistakes in my own writing, but I am proud of what I’ve written in this new draft. Am I blind to new mistakes? When I look at this years from now will I be just as disappointed?

There are some good lines, though, that I was able to lift and drop into the updated version. Like this one: “He grinned like a magician who had just successfully fooled you into believing he conjured an elephant out of thin air when all he’d done was merely pull it from his sleeve.” I like that one. Maybe I wasn’t a complete blockhead back then.

It’s inevitable that I’m a better writer now than I was before. I’ll be a better writer six years from now. The one thing I know that won’t change is I will always hope, but never know, that I’m good enough.

Celebrating 45 Years of Sobriety
January 24, 2020

I try to avoid thoughts of what my life might have been had I been dealt better cards or rolled better stats. That kind of thinking is pointless. I'm not where or who I thought would be when I was a child, but I got exactly what everyone gets, a lifetime. And in that lifetime I got to do some pretty great things with some pretty great people. If that means swallowing an ounce of depression for every cup of comfort, then I say bottoms up.

There's no guaranty my life would have been better. With my father as role model, I might have been a drunk, a junkie. I could have died on a waterfall that one time had I not been lucky. Any number of things could have gone wrong and ruined or ended my life. I got what I got, and I try to sift out the broken glass and hold on to the gold. There's a lot of gold in your life if you look for it.

--More Journal Entries--

"Too many flames with too much to burn, and life's only made of paper" --Ronnie James Dio

"Words are flowing out
Like endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip away
Across the universe" --John Lennon

"Bow to the paper Gods in a world that is paper thin
The fools in town are ruling now" --Duran Duran

"Here I sit writing on the paper
Trying to think of words you can't ignore"
--Alice in Chains

"Working for paper and for iron
Work for the right to keep my tie on
Working for paper and for iron
Work for the unicorn and lion" --XTC