Surely One of the Fugliest Words in the English Language

     Last night I was watching Warriors basketball as my imaginary second eldest daughter, charming pretty intelligent but mischievous Ingrid, played with some blocks nearby. She was talking to herself, as she often does. During the commercial break, I turned my attention to what she was saying and caught her using a bad word: "bulwark." That's almost a gurp. Didn't get it from me. I said: "Hey!" She pretended not to hear me so I picked her up and spun her around, saying, "did I just hear you use a bad word? huh? huh?" I rubbed my stubbly face into her neck, making this munching noise I started employing after I became a father. She laughed her delightful laugh, pushing my face away. I landed her gently on the floor and said: "But, seriously, don't use that word." She asked why. I said: "It's a bad word." She asked why. I said: "Because I say so." She asked why. I said: "Hmmmm, good question. Do you know what the word 'fugly' means, perchance?" She said no. The game was back on and I returned to my seat. She crawled into my lap and asked repeatedly what "fugly" means. Looking around and above her, I told her to ask her mom. She pouted and went limp for a while. Then she slid off and returned to her blocks. During the next commercial break, I opened the dictionary to search for a good synonym. I thought: Wall. Aegis. Barrier. Fortification. Warriors D. But was I missing another? I forced myself to look up the offensive word, in sound and look if not meaning. As I approached the entry, I came across: "buffoonery"..."bugaboo"..."bugbear" and slammed the dictionary shut. The game was back on. Ingrid was crouched near my feet, looking up at me, smiling. When I wasn't paying attention she'd slipped near the basket and gone for the dunk: a block in my cup of water. Redoubt! There's another. I picked her up again. "I'm bout to dunk you, little girl."

Abandoning the Journal

     I've heard it before and I'll hear it again: the humble journal as epic literary project. Someone decides that committing to paper the detritus of the day and the mind, every day, for decades, will equate to nothing less than a masterpiece. The result: thousands and thousands of unreadable pages. What's useful about these stories is that they amplify all the problems inherent to the form I ran into on my own.

There's a certain satisfaction in getting it all on paper. It soothed me. It was habit. After I began thinking of myself as a writer, it became memory and writing exercise. I made vague plans to mine it for real work later. And I must have figured it was better to unload on the page than to try the patience of someone I knew. But eventually I found I was deleteriously repeating myself, today's irritation or worry sounding much like yesterday's and last week's and last month's. If I never noticed, if I never thought past the moment's satisfaction and relief, I would have picked up a bad habit. I would have amassed unreadable pages.

Writing is rewriting, the old truism goes. I wasn't about to disfigure my pages with a lot of erasing. And after completing an entry, I pretty much lost interest. On to the new day. Another writer, however, may take care to rewrite and improve entries, possibly making it easier by using a computer instead of writing longhand. This would require more time, of course, but also deeper self-involvement. Without it, one couldn't stand poring over the minutiae of subjective experience again and again to edit. Another problem: Self-absorption. Seeing little or nothing past your subjective experience. In which case, does the writing really improve?

More time rewriting means less time writing, that is for unloading the new day's details, or for going out to gather them. This may prove intolerable to the diarist, eager for material. So forget rewriting. Thus: pages and pages of details, poorly written, unreadable, wasted. 

Another old truism: books are made from other books. Except reading would reduce time for doing anything else too. For someone working 40 hours a week at a job not directly related to literature, there are few hours to spare. Even less if one is in a relationship. Even less if one is raising kids. If the choice is between writing a journal entry and reading, I choose reading. Another voice. Writing about reading could be a journal entry. But at that point one is writing notes. For those truly consumed with themselves, reading is just another distraction. Instructive outside voices are few, everything is fascinating because it happened to the writer, beliefs go safely unchallenged and calcify. Once more: unreadable pages.

Ideally, somewhere along the way the reader learns to distinguish between an inferior artificial piece of writing and a superior authentic piece of writing. The journal would seem to be an easy path toward the latter: the I-voice with which one is most familiar, the material of the day close at hand. But it can be inauthentic in its way too, not merely an imperfect record but a record of glaring omissions and evasions and justifications, of petty grievances and sickly handwringing given an outsize form. Diary can consume diarist. The easy path to authentic work doesn't exist.

I don't care about your life, in journal or diary form, probably. Almost every one I've tried to read I put down after less than fifty pages. (On the internet, I've read no more than a few pages of them, in the distant past. Online, the form seems to have been supplanted by social media. Telling.) When I look back on how journals and diaries got on my reading list, it wasn't because someone championed them on the basis of aesthetic merit. (Although I've rarely encountered readers who deem them essential and count them among their favorites.) That someone would keep a diary for most of a lifetime is its own promotion. And I've been lured by the prospect of a tour of someone's secrets, albeit without fully considering what that means. What I discovered in one instance, only after purchase and not from any back cover information, were the confessions of a rapist. The journals and diaries that remain on my list or my shelf were written under extreme circumstances, namely political turmoil. And I'd give a canonical writer the benefit of the doubt, the general expectation being that one will get the personal voice of the writer behind better works.

Fervor waned. I began skipping more and more days, reporting less and less about them when I didn't until one day I stopped altogether. So tiresome and suffocating. Since it was never intended as my grand statement, I could move on without fear that my own unreadable pages would never find their proper audience. Still the thought of writing something persisted. Abandoning the journal was like busting out of a gray sweaty windowless room to start the search for whatever that might be.