My Historical Musings

I think this journal will be disadvantageous for me, for I spend my time now like a spider spinning my own entrails. ~Mary Boykin Chesnut


In my garage, beneath the workbench I made with my own hands out of two by fours and plywood, is a stack of ratty old books. They are ratty in the sense that the covers scratched by the years, the pages tattered from the many times I hurriedly scribbled my thoughts in multiple colors of ink.

I looked at them yesterday, looked at them briefly after working out on my stationary bike, picked a few of sawdust covered books up, turned them over in my sweaty hands, smelled the fusion of pencil and ink and paper. I perused the pages, read a few of the thoughts entered almost two decades ago and thought, who was that guy? What was going on in the head of the guy that wrote these pages? Did he finally exercise the demons that dogged him for those tormented years?

The author was at once familiar and forgotten. I guess it's good that I did not recognize all his faces for, if they were as familiar as looking in a mirror, that would mean I was still stuck in a 20 year old rut, still the fool I was in my youth. Life is about change, it's about growing, it's about becoming a better human being. I plan to go back and read some more in the near future, to see where else I have grown and, more importantly, to see the places where I am still stuck and the places I have back slid.

I will open those glimpses of my life and dig into my own history, dig into thoughts I felt were so pressing that I had to record them. It will be interesting to see from whence I came. I am glad I kept those journals, my historical musings.