Spied on an office desk of a goss news site where I swear to
God you have be under thirty to be on staff: A journal with the title 1970s STYLE LAPTOP.
I can remember why it was that I starting running on a
regular basis, going on forty years now. But I don’t remember precisely why I
started a journal. Outside of two creative writing workshops, I’ve never been
schooled in the literary arts. In college, I didn’t as much as take a single
English course, having majored in journalism and political science. If I were
going to write it would be for a job. Since 1979, I’ve had nine full-time jobs.
Except for a bizarre five-month foray into public relations, I’ve been
newspapering, editing and writing.
In June 1983, I went out on the road, planning to be gone
from home until the following June. That’s when I started scribbling. On a trip
that would take me across the US on a Greyhound bus and airborne to Tahiti, New
Zealand, Australia, Mexico and Cuba, before I hitched a right in a four-seater
Cessna back north.
In Tasmania two lovely travel companions bought me a journal
that they presented to me with some ceremony and with touching inscriptions. It
was my first journal. Christmas 1983.
I’ve filled a sizable book shelf of journals in the past
thirty-two years. Off and on for awhile, but since the nineties I’ve been writing
regularly in a journal. Story ideas, impressions. Pretty much everything you
read in this blog was first put down in longhand.
We do things for our mental health. When I haven’t written
in my journal for a few days, I feel it. Like a bank of storm clouds. At times
the writing is slow, at times just a few notes. But when it comes to getting to
a place where I can create, to go beyond the workaday writing and editing of my
newspaper life, I need to sit down with my 1970s STYLE LAPTOP. And write.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Burglary by Betty Medsger
