A friend of mine asked me if I remembered the name of some guy I knew and who she went out with briefly many years ago. I remembered his first name, but, alas, not his last.
So I went into this briefcase have in the attic that has a bunch of diaries I kept. They are incredibly, and sometimes boringly complete, starting in the early 1970s and ending in the mid-1980s. But the period of this brief romance is not covered, in large part because a whole bunch of these notebooks were destroyed in a flood in the storage area of my apartment building in the mid-1990s.
Having opened them up, I’m trying to ascertain what to do with them. On the one hand, there is a treasure trove of dates when I saw various concerts, movies, plays, and what I thought of them at the time. I saw Judy Collins in 1982 in Glens Falls. How did I get there and who did I go with?
Or the 1987 Comic Con in San Diego, where I wrote about various panels I attended and who I hung out with.
On the other hand, a lot of it, I expect, is boring as heck.
On the third hand, maybe it’ll be surprising and insightful.
On the fourth hand, I was 19 in the early books. How insightful could I possibly have been?
On the fifth hand, it might remind me of people, people I once cared about, lost in memory and time.
On the sixth hand, it might remind me of people, people I once cared about, lost in memory and time for a reason.
I could come up with more hands, but you get the idea.
Some of it, I imagine, would be fodder for that roman a clef I once threatened to write. Or for this blog. Figuring out the cost/benefit analysis is difficult.
I’ll probably wade into one of these when totally bereft of content here and see what, if any, I’d wish to share, then probably burn it.