Journals

Since I've been doing audiobooks are becoming more productive it seems a bit of a paradox but it's true. I'm finding that I can put it cd ROM and I do my computer or the radio I have over my microwave (which has a CD-ROM player inside)push the play button and then listen to books being read while I cook, washed dishes or even fold clothes. I have been trying to figure out other things I can do while the CD-ROM plays and I've come up with scanning journals I have produced over the years onto a hard drive.

As I scan each page of the Journal I am thankful I took the time to write what I did right. I am a bit heartbroken one of all the time I did not write in to of the journals I've misplaced over the years. I am even going to consider scanning and copies of old day timers which in effect our journals in and of themselves. This is going to be a long task but what more noble task and take my time in putting this material together? The nearest age-old question what am I going to do when I'm done? Are what's going to happen to these documents when I die? I plan to disseminate copies of this document (s)to my kids for sure and whoever else might want one. The materials pretty raw both in appearance and some content but that's the way life goes. Perhaps if I had another lifetime I could go through and re-type the material and maybe even rephrase some of the entries, however I have some issues with the whole concept of rewriting history i.e. Ender's Game . I have a strong suspicion a lot of folks my family really scrubbed up their histories a lot when they wrote them down. I guess I cannot blame them but I don't know how ethical that is if you're going to write your history right to history or write fiction but call it historical fiction.

As I wrote the last of that paragraph I remembered the period of time in my life that I stopped writing my daily Journal. AsI was going through a dark period. One of my marriages had just broken up and the time going up to that period had been fraught with marital discord, infringements of the law and vocational stresses are related to the marriage. The depression from all this stress became so great I could no longer write it down. I don't know if it was just too painful to write or I did not want to revisit this point in my life I do later time or because such fear of my immediate future that I couldn't write it down. Now however I wish I had. I think that time now is so interesting particularly how I survived that period of time in my life and who knows maybe something within that time could assist someone else going through similar challenges. So I wonder, even if I had a good excuse (if there is such a thing) for not writing if this is just a cop out.

I wish I had done a better job not only in writing a journal but in cataloging my journals in a safe place. I know there are complete years I have lost. This is true also from the digital format. I cannot believe how many times I have saved journals, in the old days on floppy disks and even written some to CD-ROM just to lose them one way or the other to either physically losing the medium or the medium becoming degraded to the point of non-usability. Either way I try not to think of what I've lost for just make sure I continue to write, journalized and save what I've written so far.