It’s Friday, nice outside, and can’t or don’t want to read anymore. Today feels like a good day to write without pretence, just write something real. This is going to seem like a conceit, untrustworthy, but still maybe worth a shot. Mix things up. Write less self-consciously, more directly. Hopefully by writing this on the phone, putting it all down in an email draft, a more direct voice or true-to-life vibe will come through. Are you there, God, it’s… kidding. No arch references, no tricks, no thinking; just real writing, just like a diary entry.
There’s something immediately compelling about purportedly real stuff. If it turned out that all those reality shows were fully and completely scripted, each participant remarkably well-rehearsed, wouldn’t folks stop watching? Or if it turned out that all those writers of autofiction were totally fabricating that mundane stuff, wouldn’t everyone maybe choose to read something else? Or wouldn’t we all, at least, watch and read this stuff differently? It’s hard, though, to say what it is about the reality part of reality tv or the auto- part of autofiction is really doing. What makes it more or differently intriguing than anything else? Or, for some (surely), more or differently unappealing than anything else? (Who are these questions for?)
No one, obviously, takes any of the allegedly real stuff at face value - but there is a kind of presumption or presupposition that somewhere at the core of all the pure artifice of television or publishing or whatever is the hard, indigestible stone of something really real, something that wasn’t designed or deliberately placed there by some executive producer, author, or creator of any kind. Why do we go looking for this kind of thing in art or content or whatever when we’re surrounded by it constantly? Maybe because our reality is too direct. We need something indirect. Or we want a glimpse at or access to someone’s else’s for a little while. We need a reality that’s a little distant from our own.
The park is less empty than usual. Some dude in a hoodie is drinking one of those bottled Starbucks Frappuccinos. A woman with a backpack is on a bench, on her phone. The hoodie guy finished his drink, threw the bottle out, and walked off to who knows where just now.
Is this the kind of thing people write in diaries?
Diary feels outmoded as a term. People keep journals or do morning pages. Is it always meant to be therapeutic? Or do folks write just to write? Was Pepys - with his codes and his logorrhoea (pot calling kettle black but nevermind) - documenting things for himself alone or did he have a sneaking suspicion that centuries later others would want to know about the realities of the world he inhabited? Or did he think that maybe, just maybe, people would be interested in him? And, then, did imagining the future influence what he did or didn’t put down in the present? Of course it did, but no way to say how. Would love to read a shadow version of Pepys. Learn of all the things he didn’t want or think to document. Maybe Pepys had a stalker and they, too, kept a coded diary that we just haven’t yet found? Would love to learn about Pepys from someone other than Pepys.
The woman with a backpack on the bench just biked right by on her way elsewhere.
Ok. Diaries are definitely not for writing about the idea of diaries. Need to write personal stuff. That’s the purpose. Diaries are meant to be private because they’re full of private details, things you wouldn’t share with others. But haven’t the people who write diaries seen like a single teen drama or sitcom? Doesn’t mom always riffle through drawers or lift up the mattress to discover that, omg, Melissa is maybe pregnant or got high at the bus stop with that bad kid from the wrong side of the tracks or whatever? Always mothers and daughters, the drama around diaries. You don’t see fathers digging around for a son’s diary. Sons don’t keep diaries (canonically). What would they even write?
Folks talk about writer’s block. Wonder if a blocked writer would have just as much trouble with the blank page of a diary as they do with the blank page they’re meant to use to write a novel or poem or story. Maybe a diary is even more challenging. As much as a fear that your novel is going to suck might stifle creative work, cause you to freeze up before a blinking cursor, the fear that your daily life and private thoughts might not be worth putting down on paper or, worse, that you might write them down wrongly or poorly is legit terrifying. It’s one thing to find yourself unable to make fiction but something else to find yourself incapable to face your very own set of facts.
That’s, maybe, what diaries are for? To make certain things facts? Or to testify to their being facts already? The feelings or thoughts that would flit away or change in the normal course of the day get exteriorized and fixed for a moment. Writing it down makes you find a word and finding a word hems in what it is. The limits of your language aren’t the limits of your world, but your world does seem nicely limited when put it down in words. Feeling a certain type of amorphous way becomes “feeling morose” or “struck with another bout of melancholia this morning” or “joyful beyond compare right now” or whatever.
Other people probably use personal pronouns to refer to themselves when they write their diary.
Never had the urge to keep a diary, but have definitely wanted to have kept one. Like, never wake up and want to write about events or feelings (really) - but sometimes would love to consult a document that captured what random and inconsequential (or consequential!!) thoughts occurred two months or years ago. It would force a different perspective or reorient the value of things. Oh, yeah, that wasn’t as important as it seemed. But could also, like most things, backfire. Damn, forgot all about that! Lost that, too! Wow, sure took that for granted!
If you keep a diary for long enough wouldn’t that prompt a kind of vertigo? Like, Jesus, there is so much stuff here! What a mess! The mind is a byzantine clusterfuck. It doesn’t stop. Years and years of daily diary entries would probably be so full of so much that has no recognizable or clear or discernible existence outside those pages. Seems like a recipe for existential paranoia. But also maybe a certain sort of comfort. These might be the same thing.
The guy who teaches kickboxing or some other foot-focused martial art in the park has arrived. He’s wearing a remarkable amount of Brazilian attire. He normally shows up with his music already playing, but not today. He’s recounting to a student a fight he had last night. He didn’t back off, he didn’t hesitate. Pow, pow, pow, just like that I took him down. Easy. I’ll show you just how it’s done that way you can do it too. Easy. That guy will know what not to do next time. For sure. So easy. Pow.
Someone on a podcast - can’t remember which one - was complaining that the category of “content” is slowly ruining everything. No one makes movies or writes essays or takes photographs, he was saying, they produce content. Every event or story or idea is packaged up as a consumable product. This was terrible, he said. He didn’t have much of an argument for why some generic category would sully or damage all the particular stuff contained in it. But still it’s interesting to consider that our collective interest in content (broadly conceived) suggests that we’re now maybe less interested in form than folks were in the past. Whereas it was - maybe ten or fifteen years ago - probably really important to folks whether someone kept a sort of diary by way of blog (written) vs a vlog (videoed), now it doesn’t seem like that distinction is all that meaningful. (Are those parentheticals necessary? Who are they for? The difference between a blog and vlog is perfectly clear isn’t it?) Now it just matters that someone is delivering content by some means. The medium is no longer the message. The message is the message. What, though, is the message transmitted by a diary? Or, more pertinently, a diary entry shared with others?
Exhibitionism/voyeurism is a thrill. But can you be a voyeur in regards to an exhibitionist? Can you exhibit yourself to a voyeur? Wouldn’t they cancel each other out?)
Whatever the message, it’s a compelling one. Would totally read any diary cover to cover (especially if authentic, like unpublished, goodness). The more banal the better. Write about buying bandaids! Discuss the possibility of bangs! What did you have in your tote today?! Anything that isn’t crafted is captivating.
Almost bought Highsmith’s journals for the dozenth time yesterday. Freud would probably have something to say about the number of times that book was taken off the shelf and put back and taken off and put it back. Seems so interesting to get access to the person so obsessed with impersonation, but also seems flawed or misguided to assume that that person is contained in their allegedly private writing. Why write “allegedly” right there? So suspicious. Telling. Go on.
The kickboxers’ playlist just went from “I Feel it Coming” by The Weeknd to “Got You Where I Want You” by The Flys which - as far as events go - seems totally unreal unless dude’s playlist is called something like “Forced Intimacy & Creep Love Megamix.” These aren’t confessional songs, but they feel like it. There’s a jarring kind of vulnerability that comes through both tracks even tho there’s nothing but canny dominance being asserted. That said, maybe all expressions of vulnerability come across as veiled assertions of dominance in the end. Gotta feel kind of invulnerable to share that you’re vulnerable, right? Strong to display weakness, honest to confess to a lie, etc.
Or maybe it’s the other way round?
Battery is already at 1%. If this were fiction, that fact would mean that the story would end in the middle of an arbitrary sentence. It would serve to insist on the reality of things. Couldn’t continue because phone died! But a phone could just as plausibly die at the end of a sentence. Or you really could be cognizant of the phone’s ill health and wrap things up before it took matters into its own hands. There are lots of very real possibilities, but only one outcome that seems to strongly signify reality. Now, though, that that’s explicitly on the table as a formal device, what? It’s all necessarily unreal? Is it less of a diary than it was?
The cynic would take all this as just another grift regardless. Diaries deliberately shared can’t be diaries. It’s just a ploy, a calculated plea for a certain kind of attention. Who or what, though, can satisfy the cynics? Can’t remember how Diogenes died, but he likely wasn’t buried in that tub. He, too, eventually got yolked into the semi-sentimental, overdetermined, and bullshitty conventions of the world like everyone else. Distrust of convention or anything else only goes so far.
Would love to read Diogenes’ diary, but there isn’t one to read. Have to read other people’s accounts of that weirdo. Have to trust that others are being honest about a man who claimed he could find no honest man. Funny.
How do people know when a diary entry is done? They probably don’t concern themselves with conclusions. It’s not that kind of thing. They’re not worried about satisfying anyone, about making a point, about giving some future version of themselves or snooping family member or broader distant public some takeaway or upshot that makes the effort of engagement worthwhile. Diaries are probably even more interesting by dint of the fact that they aren’t deliberate or purposive. The rationale for their existence - even if explicitly written out - isn’t ever totally clear. They’re not a product, but a process. It’s writing without a clear or distinct idea of a reader. But doesn’t that characterize all writing? Even letters are sent knowing that no one or anyone might eventually find them. Is everything inevitably just a diary entry? (What’s with all the questions?) No, the difference between diaries (even those deliberately shared with others) and every other kind of expression is really that
Sorry, but who could resist?
Oh, but also maybe we’re pregnant??
For real. Kidding. For real. Kidding.
I've kept a diary since age 8. I have literally hundreds of diaries. I agree that it's a way to declutter the mind, it's also therapeutic, and for me a ritualistic creative practice, writing in this way accomplishes a lot of things. As for rereading them... sometimes I reread the old ones and wonder who the f*** that person was, other times I meet a version of myself I'd not perceived with the right kinda space... I love rereading and experiencing a bird's eye view of transformation.
Now for my regular commenting ritual
"Or, for some (surely), more or differently unappealing than anything else?"
That's me; reality in books, TV, films, etc for me is generally less appealing than fiction.
As a person who has regularly kept a diary for just over two years now, this is pretty funny. You’re definitely overthinking it. I would say that, most of the time, a diary is just a way to declutter my mind. This can take many forms--maybe I’m recording events I don’t want to forget, maybe I’m writing out the motivations behind a major decision I have to make, maybe I’m venting about interpersonal things. Sometimes I record the details I see around me, but only when they interest me and I want to create some sort of time capsule. I certainly don’t think about when to stop an entry. I often write on the metro and finish mid-sentence when I have to get off.