This Journal

One Art Thought (7.31.99) Yeah, Hot (7.30.99) Self-Involved (7.29.99) Old Paper (7.28.99) Musical Things (7.27.99) Think School (7.26.99) A Family Weekend (7.25.99) A Plan (7.23.99) Friends (7.21.99) The Ordinary (7.19.99) Casual Contact (7.17.99) A Feast Day (7.16.99) Dada Recovery (7.15.99) Bastille Day (7.14.99) Little Things (7.12.99) Another Sunday (7.11.99) Writing (7.9.99) Classrooms (7.8.99) Inside Out (7.7.99) Appropriations (7.6.99) The Pleasures of Peace (7.5.99) What A Dope (7.4.99) The Move (7.3.99)

One visitor sometime back, on reading my high school journal, commented that it was unusual for a man to be writing a journal. I had never thought about that, since the high school journal was a class assignment and it was an all-male school. From the start, gender never really seemed connected to journaling.

My first experience with online journals occurred when I stumbled onto Misanthrope, which is written and orchestrated by a guy. Yet when I look into the 200-some online journals he lists at his site, overwhelming numbers of them are composed by women, and the men who write these things are most frequently adolescent guys in the midst of all those big changes.

Maybe there's something about this (or any) kind of self-revealing writing that runs against the grain of most men in U.S. culture. It just makes us look too open, too vulnerable. I've kept paper journals off and on for most of my adult life. When people ask me if I'm going to post those as I have the high school one, I quickly say no because in those notebooks I practiced a level of (what I saw as) honesty that makes it very painful reading, like staring at an open wound out of context. No sense can be made of most of it. And no public should be expected to read that.

So this journal, if it becomes one, will be subject to the same self-censoring impulses that we perform each day out in the world. I hope that this will be a civil journal of my experience as I carve out a new portion of life. So, we might as well begin with The Move.