A Flawed Life

Stupid picture of chair/ottoman/wall, etc.  I have nothing else at the moment.  So why post? 

Compulsion. 

I looked back at some of my journals the other day.  I used to write in them obsessively every day for many years.  Oh, there are millions of pages, impossible to read, but you (I) can pick and choose at will and find little gems.  It is funny, I find, how little of your life you actually remember.  I, I mean.  Reading my own journals from years ago was like reading about somebody else's life.  Truly, I remembered little until I read it, and then the thing would come back to me as a sudden thrill.  Our (my) lives are more interesting than we know.  Mine has been thrilling. 

I am going to begin journal writing again.  All the details I can't write here.  To write a narrative gives one's (my) life shape and meaning.  As Salter said so poignantly, the one who writes it keeps it.  Everything else is lost. 

Some of what I read, however, is embarrassing.  It felt like being James Franco in the #MeToo era, or like being Lena Dunham any time.  Fortunately, it's a journal.  Maybe I'll edit out all the parts I don't want to remember or want anyone to know in the future.  Surely. 

Look at all those remotes in the little monkey-adorned metal ivy pot in the picture above.  It would be more embarrassing if there were not a book and a magazine lying there, too.  Laying.

A photo, like a journal, is evidence.  Perhaps it is best to have neither.  But no. . . it is better to have lived a flawed life than to not have lived at all.