I can’t remember when it was I started writing in a journal. Certainly not in childhood. That would be too much like school. Even in university, where I chose journalism – the science of journals? hmmm – as a course of study, not because I was especially taken with the idea of being a newsman, or had a strong desire to express my opinions on the issues of the day. Rather, I was first inclined to take up acting, but when I learned that greater than ninety percent of professional actors were out of work, the very idea of college as a place to find, feed and care a passion, if not more than one that you will cultivate for the rest of your life, maybe even make a living out of, all central to the experience, the college years as Odyssey, discovery, a track as foreign to me as cricket. In my case, think table hockey, a narrow shallow slot from center to just below the faceoff dot, no surprises; go to college with a task in mind, a job at the end, and although Carleton University journalism was nothing to be ashamed of, quite the contrary, I entered its halls with no illusions: come four years and I’d be working in a job, and sure, let it be writing and reporting, and no it couldn’t just as easily have been computer programming, or accounting, or surveying, not anything further afield because my mind was made up, like the right wing riding up and down the table-hockey slot, just staying the course, the very idea that there was anything more to say about what I would do with my life not exactly a sacrilege because I didn’t prejudge myself, didn’t allow myself the luxury. In small-town Canada that greater sense of self, or a higher destiny, might suit in a confession to a girlfriend, or in my best pals from childhood, but any specialness like that had best be hidden away, you didn’t write any of it down in a journal, because to do so, to feel that you were worthy of such consideration could only mean one thing, the dreaded: Who do you think you are?
