Monday, June 25, 2007

OF FOLLY & FODDER

Orginally composed on January 28, 1997

WELL...since everyone else is spilling all in declaring the spikes and spokes of their past and present journalkeeping habits, I may as well add my own two pence, having kept a rather informal text of this sort rather irregularly over the years in old-fashioned notebooks and later, on disk.

After giving up the traditional journal task several times I've come to recognize that I don't really appreciate the form as much as I do the E-mail discipline. I suspect my need for instant gratification by way of external response, plus a general distaste for maintaining secrecies result in a preference for calling the bluff on private thought processes and identify the latter form as the my own favored natural journal.

Fortunately for me in this case, ever since the spring of 1992 when I first logged on to AOL and Prodigy, I've always had at least one equally prolific correspondent with whom I have been able to vent any issues of the hour mixed with any general ponderances which the modern mind might tend to address. And presently I can boast that "pour moi" this softly fluctuating group buoyed by Steve Taylor and Lynn Landry in a bicoastal cheek to cheek is indeed the golden age of "writing to keep writing" form the journal has traditionally meant to its creators.

That said, of course all my journals of the past and E-mail are in custody, hardcopies alphabetized and filed according to the name of my correspondent. My computerphobe but oh so revolutionary pal Len Bracken and a few other hanging-wit know-it-alls have taken me to task for my energies focused in this area. What is that? I really don't understand their arrogant tones toward E-mail, but I suppose to utilize a line from a long forgotten poem I once wrote might be a propos: Ignorance and virtue STILL suck on the same straw...

GT

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