Write every day

journal of sorts, really more of a diary which is to say there isn’t a whole lot of navel gazing in jottings. The discipline of a diary is a good tonic to mindless living it makes you pause, reflect, collect, record.

I have started carrying a pocket notebook while I work my job. My hope is to capture snatches of conversation I overhear each day. I started doing this ten days ago and last night I thought of Jack Kerouac, for he did the same the same. I am not Ti Jean; just a guy on the Iron Range filling his spot on the roster at the plant each day. Kerouac wrote, perhaps transcribed is the apt word, with one eye on the future - I am not so talented, I merely for me - but what eloquence I overhear each day!

Well, I went to my slumbering blog and wrote today. Nothing more than a simple recitation of events and people. In essence, I think, every writer (by which I mean anyone who writes) aims at satisfying their ultimate audience, namely themselves. I find this mere thought heartening for it relieves me of any need to search for profoundity. Honesty first, all else will follow.

To know what you are doing requires a sense of what you are not doing and in this prosaic spirit when I talk about writing I exclude emails, work correspondence etc. Those things aren’t really writing if I stay true to my original intent of unearthing what I think.

A while back I started a blog which I let lapse and have decided to resurrect the thing and use it as my repository, or “morning pages” if you will. Just the thought of doing it though makes me blanche.

I am not so bold as to think I have anything of particular merit to add to the conversation of the world; instead, I want to write for the simplest of reasons: to learn what I think.

Eric Hoffer, the essayist and longshoresman, liked to say that if you couldn’t express an idea in 500 words or less than you really didn’t have an idea. I like that. Writing is another way of finding out what you are made of.