Beginning

I’ve had journals before. Briefly. Thin grid-paper ones, Moleskines and Leuchtturms. I bought a three-year diary—hardcover, with a slipcase—and started it on a random day in September. That afternoon, I walked past an apartment in my neighborhood and watched a woman dance with her dog through a bay window; she held the little dachshund to her chest, its paw in her hand, like ballroom dancers, swaying to music. Nothing else in the subsequent entries lived up to that first image. I struggled to fill the diary out each day, then whited out all the entries on the first of the year, hoping to start over. That lasted until maybe February.

If I were to pinpoint why, exactly, the endeavor of journaling never works for me, it’s that I can’t imagine anybody ever reading it. I certainly won’t. Those small moments—the woman and the dog, fragments of dreams, overheard turns of phrase, the glances exchanged with my partner in our living room, the cats draped on either side of us—they stay with me whether they’re written down or not. I can’t imagine sitting down to read it years after the fact, hoping to return to someplace. If I have kids, I hope to be enough of an open book with them that they don’t need to seek out any further understanding of me through things I’ve written. Perhaps it’s that I’m unsure if I’m capable of actual honesty in something intended for my eyes only; there’s more honesty in telling the stranger beside me on a plane my real name, in sharing the facts of my life with somebody I’ll never see again, than there is in writing the truth down and sticking it in a drawer. Maybe it’s that my handwriting sucks.

This isn’t to discount the act of writing for its own sake, writing as practice, whatever one likes to call it. I’ve got many scraps here and there on various hard drives and in old notebooks that exist for no reason other than having been written down, that will never go anywhere or be shared in any way. And if my recent track record of submitting both a novel manuscript and several short stories is any indication, even the stuff I’m writing in hopes of sharing in one way or another is fated to wind up seen by nobody but me, so I’m perhaps stumbling backwards into the practice anyway.

But I have wanted, lately, to be a little more diaristic, and to force myself to write in a way that forces itself to think about an audience. So, to split the baby, I’ve started this. When I have something to say, I’ll publish it. When some piece of fiction I’ve written and submitted to various places puts up Dion Waiters numbers, I’ll face reality and just put it here. Not by any set schedule or with any promises of quality. I don’t have any expectations for this or any of my other writing anymore, really. The name doesn’t mean anything; it’s a phrase from a joke on Twitter I saw long ago that stuck with me. But the words mean something. And, nevertheless, there is the practice. I’ll see where that gets me.