Journal Syndrome
On a plane not long ago I became aware of a lady a few rows ahead of me writing in a journal . Since I am an avid journal writer myself, and often spent time journal-ing on a plane, I could not help but notice her. I was not sitting close enough to see what she was writing but how she was writing. She would write a sentence then scratch it out. She would write another word and scratch it out. She would keep maybe three words and scratch the next sentence out. I don't mean she was just drawing a line through the text, she was attacking it. At first I thought she was sketching because it resembled a child slashing through a coloring book. She scratched the page with her pen so many times, the thought itself must have been permanently scoured from her mind. She continued down the page in this manner leaving only small islands of text still standing on a completely inked up page.
She approached the journal with what I could only interpret as anger. Each page was being punished for reasons a slab of pulp can never understand. Surely, the paper thought, it must be the fault of the pen. After all, paper is the journalistic equivalent of a catcher in the game of baseball, the pen is the pitcher; unfortunately unlike the baseball catcher the paper has no way to signal for the pitch it thinks is best. In this process the paper serves no purpose other than to be a target for ink stains. The page of paper was reduced to a marked up and blackened mess, hardly the dignified end to a once living conifer.
The pen must have been confused as well. Designed to deliver ink in a controlled feed to create legible symbols on a page, the pen found itself complicit in random acts of destruction. Destroying even the few symbols it was allowed momentarily to create.
Then we come to the woman herself and my Dr. Phil-esque wondering? I even hear my questions in that Texas accent of his... "Whut are you thinkin." I mean a journal is a journal and it is just stream of consciousness anyway; why waste the ink to correct a couple of words that no one will read anyway?
I have always believed in a hand written journal because of the tactile nature of the process. It is that hand to brain connection when the brain's abstract nature is controlled and channeled into a precise mark on a page. Nothing could be more useful in developing your thinking ability than to exercise the brain in such a way. That is why handwriting analysis is so insightful. In its purest form, hand writing on a page is like an EKG of the brain. A graph that reflects the brain's emotional state at the time.
That being said, obliterating those marks on a page is the mental equivalent spanking the brain for attempting to communicate. Think at least milli-seconds ahead of the pen so it has a chance to write something, communicate in some way. There will be those times when you write "to" instead of "two" or "there" instead of "their." Do you have to obscure such transgressions from the holy page?
And then the plane landed and I was back home. I realized that thinking about this woman's odd journalistic style had completely occupied the time I had to write in my own journal.
Ironic.
As you were,
Jay
She approached the journal with what I could only interpret as anger. Each page was being punished for reasons a slab of pulp can never understand. Surely, the paper thought, it must be the fault of the pen. After all, paper is the journalistic equivalent of a catcher in the game of baseball, the pen is the pitcher; unfortunately unlike the baseball catcher the paper has no way to signal for the pitch it thinks is best. In this process the paper serves no purpose other than to be a target for ink stains. The page of paper was reduced to a marked up and blackened mess, hardly the dignified end to a once living conifer.
The pen must have been confused as well. Designed to deliver ink in a controlled feed to create legible symbols on a page, the pen found itself complicit in random acts of destruction. Destroying even the few symbols it was allowed momentarily to create.
Then we come to the woman herself and my Dr. Phil-esque wondering? I even hear my questions in that Texas accent of his... "Whut are you thinkin." I mean a journal is a journal and it is just stream of consciousness anyway; why waste the ink to correct a couple of words that no one will read anyway?
I have always believed in a hand written journal because of the tactile nature of the process. It is that hand to brain connection when the brain's abstract nature is controlled and channeled into a precise mark on a page. Nothing could be more useful in developing your thinking ability than to exercise the brain in such a way. That is why handwriting analysis is so insightful. In its purest form, hand writing on a page is like an EKG of the brain. A graph that reflects the brain's emotional state at the time.
That being said, obliterating those marks on a page is the mental equivalent spanking the brain for attempting to communicate. Think at least milli-seconds ahead of the pen so it has a chance to write something, communicate in some way. There will be those times when you write "to" instead of "two" or "there" instead of "their." Do you have to obscure such transgressions from the holy page?
And then the plane landed and I was back home. I realized that thinking about this woman's odd journalistic style had completely occupied the time I had to write in my own journal.
Ironic.
As you were,
Jay
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