A friend of mine asked me if I remembered the name of some guy I knew and who she went out with briefly many years ago. I remembered his first name, but, alas, not his last.
So I went into this briefcase have in the attic that has a bunch of diaries I kept. They are incredibly, and sometimes boringly complete, starting in the early 1970s and ending in the mid-1980s. But the period of this brief romance is not covered, in large part because a whole bunch of these notebooks were destroyed in a flood in the storage area of my apartment building in the mid-1990s.
Having opened them up, I’m trying to ascertain what to do with them. On the one hand, there is a treasure trove of dates when I saw various concerts, movies, plays, and what I thought of them at the time. I saw Judy Collins in 1982 in Glens Falls. How did I get there and who did I go with?
Or the 1987 Comic Con in San Diego, where I wrote about various panels I attended and who I hung out with.
On the other hand, a lot of it, I expect, is boring as heck.
On the third hand, maybe it’ll be surprising and insightful.
On the fourth hand, I was 19 in the early books. How insightful could I possibly have been?
On the fifth hand, it might remind me of people, people I once cared about, lost in memory and time.
On the sixth hand, it might remind me of people, people I once cared about, lost in memory and time for a reason.
I could come up with more hands, but you get the idea.
Some of it, I imagine, would be fodder for that roman a clef I once threatened to write. Or for this blog. Figuring out the cost/benefit analysis is difficult.
I’ll probably wade into one of these when totally bereft of content here and see what, if any, I’d wish to share, then probably burn it.
I have journals from high school through my mid-20s, but not all years or complete years. For awhile, I used to keep journals on the computer, and I quoted from those a couples times on my blog. But the others? I’d have to type them up! Assuming I can read my handwriting, of course.
Here’s the thing: You’re probably right that they might be “boring as heck”, because most of mine are, too. But they record so much that I’ve long forgotten about, including mentioning people or events that I don’t remember at all anymore, even though they were important enough at the time to mention. I think that has value. In fact, the older I get, the more I value the things I’ve written down, partly so I don’t HAVE to remember those things. Maybe your old journals will be similar for you.