The journal one

I confess I’ve been fixated on what one is meant to write in one’s journal for longer, in fact, than I’ve written in a journal.

I’ve kept a journal since the second of March, 1989, which is a hell of a long time ago, thank you very much. On that day, in four lines — I shan’t repeat them here — I wax philosophical about how aggravating my family is; how scholastically excellent I am; and how unfortunate it is that I was not, indeed, killed at lunchtime that day when pushed down a ramp. So: typical 12-year-old bullshit.

Prior to starting my journal I’d read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, which is definitely why I thought I should start a journal. I was given a small notebook which was too cramped for my hand then and would now probably resemble a double postage stamp. Faced with such a paucity of real estate upon which to narrate my experiences I settled for terse sentences and (per Adrian) regular measurements of my dick. Some entries are a single line; their vantage into whatever a day in my life in 1989 was actually like, microscopic.

I do not still have that journal. Once Doogie Howser hit the scene I started recording my thoughts in a series of word processor files on the family computer — in software from Bank Street Writer to WordPerfect to, eventually and inevitably, Word — each saved with complicated passwords. Having developed this system, I copied out my prior longhand journal into a text file of its own, so that everything was nice and consistent.

But back to the prime question: what was meant to be in there? I should note here that there was a third influence on the nature of my journaling in my youth: an episode of a daytime talk show (can’t remember which), in which a man was featured who wrote in his diary every five minutes. He was well into his eighties. “10:45: hungry. 10:50: have eaten a tin of canned peaches. 10:55: have thrown the tin away.” Decades and decades and decades of such minutiae. I mention this because in as much as I looked at Adrian Mole and Doogie Howser as two examples of what I thought a diarist should be, I equally identified very quickly on the afternoon of the tinned peaches that I never wanted my journal to be like that.

Sometimes people hear about my journaling and react to it in some way that makes me wonder if I’ve been doing it wrong all along — my best friend, for example, moans with longing at the idea of having a record of his days from high school, making me think I should have done something along the lines of “9am, got up, went to school. First period was Science. Science was pretty good today: learned about rocks” or some such. There’s a bit of that, in the early years, I’ll admit: annotations of a day’s events, usually focusing on how I yearned for whoever I had a crush on at that moment (more Adrian Mole), or events that I thought were supposed to be important, like space shuttle launches or fire drills.

In my adulthood, though, the journal morphed into what it’s been for the most part ever since: captures of my thought processes as I move through the world, emotionally, novelistically, a space to work out how I feel about something as it’s happening, or braindump all things great and small or just write about what makes me happy or sad. It’s almost never about movies, although sometimes I mention things I’ve seen; it’s almost never about toys, either, although sometimes I mention when I’ve found something that makes me particularly giddy.

When I went to New Zealand in 2013 my girlfriend gave me a leather-bound journal (because I’d be away from my computer, see) and I wrote in it every day; and a few years later I just switched back to journaling longhand full-time. I briefly considered copying out the (then) three decades of compu-journals back into analog form but thankfully realized doing so would be cuckoo. So now I have three decades of journals that can be keyword-searched, which can be handy (more in a minute), and about a decade or so of journals that are on my bookcase and contain passages and ideas I may never visit again, although I also might, because who knows.

And in the 2020s there’s quite the Influencer Genre around journaling and stationery stores and whatnot, and there are journals where you do weird things on grids or write down good ideas (only??), and journaling practices where you plan your coming month (including finances and meals) but never reflect on rocket launches. I don’t get it anymore, and fortunately don’t care much anymore if I’m doing it right, but I’m still fascinated.

And you? What do you do in your journal? If you happen to be reading this on Ghost and are a subscriber, you can comment below.

Meanwhile, in the pastpresent

Legitimately unrelated to the ideation on this piece and more to do with my efforts to resurrect some tederick.com content from the past, I stumbled across a journal entry from February 2011 in which I basically outlined the entire goddamned thing. Not the journal thing: the “shit, should I be a writer?” thing. This was seventeen years before I effectively decided to break and reset my life in order to do that.

In light of the above, though, I’d like to remark that the last entry before the entry in question was this:

9:00 p.m. I’d like to thank Nigella Lawson for teaching me, long ago, that homemade mayonnaise is one of the nicest things you can do to cold chicken.

Remains true.

Anyway, here’s a slice of a manifesto I apparently wrote to myself on February 16, 2011, and then allowed to pass into obscurity:

All my life I’ve been a writer. For the last ten years I’ve written reviews of nearly every movie I’ve gone to see, for absolutely no reason besides my own interest. Only rarely have I had an outlet for those reviews other than my own web site and my own small circle of friends. Look further back: in university, I was stopped in the middle of an exam by a teacher (this was in Modes of Fantasy [a 3rd-year literature course]) who wanted to tell me that the term paper I had just handed in was graduate-level work; publishable work. Look further than that. In first year, I was the only one in the class who knew how to write an essay at all. In high school, my writing won awards and enrichment and my articles for the newspaper, at least once, created school-wide buzz. Further than that: a little [girl] making a speech at Parents’ Night at Blythwood, which [she] had written [herself].

I got to film school and came up against the wall. The wall was between me and moving my movies up to the next level of production and quality. It has always been absolutely, unassailably, bullshit simple for me to make my kind of movies – the Infinitely Brown kind of movies – but even when trying to convince Infinitely Brown to make The Hunt, I started to come up against the wall. Even though I made films at York that broke through the wall, they happened only half the time. The rest of the time, I was pushing on the wall. The teachers, the production committee, were douchebags. What if it hid the fact that they were also right?

My movies started not working. What are the films that I’ve made with a “professional” crew, at even whatever extremely relative level I can use that term? Absence. Monosperm (kinda). ACCORDION. And what is common to them all? They don’t really work. They’re all done “the right way” – with crew, with script, with storyboards, with planning and thought and meditation from me. And they’re all missing something, a fluidity, an ease of communication. They are forced and grinding. Yes, they are the product of pitifully little experience and practice, too. But what if, being 35, it’s time to stop expecting that practice to come?

I could push on the wall, but some people just have it. Some people just speak fluently in the language, and I’m not one of them. I understand the language – pretty well, too – but I’m not great at speaking it, at least, not at “that level.” At the other levels – the lower levels – the levels I’m too ashamed to call “real” movies – I’m fucking great! I love those movies. I love VCR9. I was so amused when I finished VCR10y that I laughed out loud for five minutes! I love Standoff. Actually, I think, I love all the “handmade” films. I think maybe I should have been thinking of them in those terms a lot longer than I have been. “Handmade.” “DIY.” “Punk.” What if I’ve been a [handmade DIY punk] video artist all this time, and I never knew it?

Meanwhile, in the presentpast

• The Screen Anarchists have listed our top 10 films of the first half of the year. Okay year so far? (Screen Anarchy)
• Working on this piece I was called to-revisit “Goodbye to All That” by Roger Ebert, a masterpiece. (RogerEbert.com)
• There’s this lady I used to work with, Raizel. That’s a name from Willow so you know I liked her immediately. She does TikToks about journaling, occasionally. I’d be lying if I didn’t say those videos drove at least some of this piece. Mostly she just dances now though (TikTok)
• “Key to appreciating Jackass is knowing that, had your life turned out a little differently, you would be this stupid. Or you are this stupid, just in ways that are more socially acceptable, or at least more commonplace.” I have seen exactly two Jackass movies. Do I need to see a third Jackass movie? (Aftermath)
• In my travels last week I also read an excerpt from Niko Stratis’ The Dad Rock That Made Me A Woman, specifically: her piece about Automatic for the People, which was (and remains) my favourite album of all time. Stratis’ book has been on my to-do list for a year now. It’s moved off the list and onto the shelf. (Welcome to Hell World — and a reader’s note, you’ve got to skip through Luke’s usual non-sequitur preamble matter to get to the actual passage, halfway down the page)
• Honestly, can’t even look at Becky Pepper-Jackson’s face without wanting to fold myself into the dirt and pull it over me. What a cowardly, fuckass country America is. What monsters we are — yes, us, in Canada — who follow doggedly in America’s wake, 5 years behind, a little brother too craven even to come up with our own atrocities. (Substack)
• If that didn’t make you feel bad enough and you’re in the mood to feel worse, Malcolm nailed it this week (complementary). (Substack)