xtcian

7/9/02 Sometimes I think this

7/9/02

Sometimes I think this is less of a journal and more of a semi-private rant space with little or no connection to the world on a daily basis. I suppose that's what happens when you live a life of lugubrious internal dialogue like I do, but sometimes it's necessary, in the interests of posterity and archivism, to actually say what I did on some of these days.

I made a private agreement with myself that I would never open one of these blogs with the word "Today," as in "Today I..." or "Today was..." or "Today we..." because that's the first tripwire in the minefield of clich. I know I'm not being graded on any of this, but avoiding trite shit can't help but make you a better writer. Sure, I'm not getting paid for this, and I have naught but a small, disturbed following (hi Mom!) but blog writing is the same as being in a cover band: you may not be playing what you want, but you're getting better at your instrument.

My Auntie Donna, though I love her to pieces, may be one of the most insane diary/letter writers ever to grace the Earth. Being the anti-Buddhists (and therefore obsessed with permanent records), Mormons make for exhaustively detailed diarists, right down to laundry loads and hedge clippings. My Aunt Marilyn, who spent 1972-1981 with the CAPS LOCK key stuck on, shouted her family letters with an attention to detail that was almost savantly autistic. I love her letters and find them impossible to out down.

But Donna (ne Idonna, due to some weird linguistic quirk of my great-grandmother Pearl) is the queen of the crop. Her letters were best described by Kent as "Joycean in the extreme, even as her subjects are mundane - sentences roll on for 40 or 50 words or more, and subjects, objects, tenses and verbs bob in a sort of goats head stew." Indeed, when she passes beyond the veil in a decade or two, Idonna completists will have roughly 15,000 typewritten pages to sort through, each with their own litany of Relief Society meetings, the installation and removal of Christmas lights, and of course, the melons she did – and, in some cases, did not – throw away.

Oh wait, I was going to say something about what I did today!
It rained, and I took a picture!

passing over the Manhattan Bridge during a squall