This spring, while doing some cleaning , I organized and minimized a lot of the books, notebooks, and notes we had stashed in the boxes and in our upstairs loft space. I opened one of the boxes and found all of my journals. Like since high school. Here’s a selection:
The first one is one that my dad got me from one of his business trips. In it you can see me copying the sentence structure of Rorschach’s journal from Watchmen. In my sophomore year of high school I was reading The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale in single issues and trying to solve it.
Here’s some poetry from summer 2002 when I was in Oxford studying British-American Media and Culture. This is from the lake district. Here’s a photo scan from this Loughrigg Fell, holding that journal, where I probably wrote that horrible poem.
Jump to New York City in 2004. Frank Miller gives me the advice to write down everything so I buy a standard one subject notebook.
For the longest time I took a pocket notebook with me everywhere in my back pocket from 2009-2013. This was brought on by John Hughes. Then of course, there is the current stage where I use bulletjournaling. Even though I think I’m not really using the format all that much anymore other than specific modules like the daily log, the brand of notebook, and the month log. The index helps too.
So really this post is about commemorating the growth happening here in these journals from when I was 16 to now—almost 40. I guess this is a place-holder as an invaluable resource in writing a memoir.
David Press 