Someday, the Knife

Someday, when I've completed my current writing projects and I have nothing to do (hah!), I'll go through each of my 50-odd journals and redo them. I'll buy some of those bound, black sketchbooks and I'll transcribe the good stuff into them, adding more content, photos, drawings, watercolors, and all that sort of thing. I'll also take an X-acto knife to some paragraphs and drawings and paste them into the new volumes. Then I'll throw the originals in a barrel and burn them...

Oh, I hear the gasps and shrieks of my friends, but it's something I've always known I will, and should, do. Not everything that happens and is then written about is fit to be read; there are some private aspects of my innermost thoughts that I really don't care to pass down to those who will come after me. Revised, annotated, and illustrated journals will be so much better.

There are those who believe journals and diaries should remain in their raw state, but most famous diarists didn't agree. Anaïs Nin extensively and painstakingly revised hers. Some of the people she wrote about say she out-and-out lied, but, really. Who cares? Anaïs Nin wrote about you! Get over it! I won't go that far; my journals were never about my angst over other people, they were about my ideas, personal growth, creative processes, and impossible dreams. What I want to edit out is the drivel.

Of course, it's the organizing that will take the most time; even transcribing the entries by hand won't be as arduous. I have thousands of photos to choose from, but they might as well be paired with the events that inspired them instead of being lost in a shoe box somewhere along the line. Left as they are, they're sure to be found by a grandchild or a great-grandchild who won't know who all of those people were.

I admit that the original journals are a bit sacred to me. I took them with me everywhere I went. Every concert, every rehearsal, every party, every dark and gloomy night... They were there.

As I say, someday.