Journals

Since I love writing, reading and all things literary, I have been given, or have purchased, lots of journals or blank books, as they are sometimes called.

These are adult equivalents of diaries, places where you write down your innermost thoughts, deep desires, heartfelt secrets.

As a writer, I have been admonished - and have admonished other writers - to keep a writer's journal for those sparks of ideas, bits of dialogue, intriguing road signs, color descriptions, etc., that you just don't want to forget.

This is supposed to be important.

I have kept lots of journals. I consider blogging to be a journal; that's really all a blog is to me, another kind of "blank book." Maybe it's used for many different things, but it really isn't so different from what you might buy at the book store, just more fluid. Just labeled differently.

I have piled in the closet stacks of hand-written journals, dating back to about 1984. I think they stop in the late 1990s, when I decided my handwriting was so poor, so crimped and illegible, that typing made much more sense.

From that point on, my journal fell into my computer, and I have diligently transferred the files first from something called Homeword, which I used with a Tandy computer, then from WordPerfect and finally to MS Word (and lastly into Notepad, which I have discovered is convert-able into most every program). I have hauled these files from disk to disk and onto each computer I've owned, handling that one computer file folder within "My Documents" as if it were gold.

With every backup, that document folder is saved, even though I haven't made a new "journal" entry, aside from blogging, in quite some time. And I do save my blog entries in that folder, I hasten to add, as I don't trust anyone but myself to ensure that these words, important to no one but myself, are safe.

The computer files are so old that some of them date back to 1988, because I have been using a home computer for that long. When I pull them up, which is not often, they're as much gobbledygook computer language as text because I haven't converted them. But the text is always in there somewhere, often painful to read, sometimes eyebrow raising, never shared.

I thought of all of this writing, all of these words, today as I perused the "diet" section at Books-A-Million, determined to yet again find a diet that I could live with. I was spurred on by the spurious words of the health nurse, by the chastening of my dreams in which I am lithe and free and able to run with deer, and by my own image in the mirror, which of course does not lie.

Diet books, including the ones I bought, say "keep a food journal" and so I had an excuse for a new journal book.

Not that I don't have any here, because of course I do. Without moving from my chair I can count five empty and unused journals, ranging in size and in price paid. That doesn't count the pile - yes, a pile - of unused 8 X 5 spiral bound notebooks.

It is the notebooks, in fact, which become my journals. The decade-old stack of journals in the closet are written in such notebooks, not the expensively purchased blank books. For one thing, if the blank book is not spiral bound, it immediately will not be used, because I dislike having to try to write in something and hold it open at the same time.

And if they are expensive and spiral bound, they are too perfect, too good, too expensive, for the likes of me to use. They are for thoughts more exquisite than mine, visions more intensely colorful, language more expertly stated.

So I use the school notebooks that long ago cost 89 cents and which now run about $2. And even today these are the notebooks I use in my work, when I interview people and take notes. Not reporter's notebooks, which are long and thin and useless as best I can see, and not 9 x 11 notebooks, which are far too wide, but 8 x 5 (or 9 x 6) notebooks which fit in my hand, and which I can, if I must, stand and hold in my left hand while scribbling with my right.

From time to time I indulge myself when I find a nice-looking spiral bound journal. "This would be good for ..." I whisper to myself, and tuck the journal beneath my arm. Sometimes I talk myself out of the purchase and put it back, but occasionally they come home with me.

Usually I wish to use these for "writer's journals" but I don't keep a writer's journal, not really. I have attempted it on numerous occasions only to find that I can't find anything I've written when I want it. So what good is it to me? Even my "personal" journals, some of which are on the computer and therefore text searchable, serve no purpose other than to exist as a record of what I was thinking when I was 27. As if it matters.

So there was no need to buy a journal just for writing down what I eat; besides, I've tried that and I cheat at it, conveniently forgetting to add the potato chips or the bad afternoon I fell completely apart and raced through two cans of root beer and an entire box of chocolate covered cherries.

I wistfully ran my hands over the journals at the book store - the moleskin covered ones, those bound in leather, another in satin. They ranged in price from $4.95 to $55.00, probably more. I might write in the $4.95 one but I knew I would not write in anything that cost more, so there was no point in the purchase.

Instead I stopped by the dollar store and found a memo book for $1. A good size to keep by the table, something that won't be hurt if I should leave it by my plate and spill spaghetti sauce on it.

A food journal to cheat in, something to remind me that writing is what I do, eating is how I live, and whatever it is in that's in between is the thing I'm striving for.