John RoderickI wanted to be a writer when I was young and I thought being a writer meant living a wild life that would pay off in stories. I carried spiral bound notebooks everywhere and wrote in a kind of Beat jargon that was exclusive to me. I KNEW this writing was bad so I never showed it to anyone, but I kept at it. My writing was bad for so long it actually gave me a complex; I was convinced it was bad even after it started to improve. Instead of prose or journalism I turned to songwriting.
I'm an obsessive archivist though, and even when I was living rough I still managed to stash these coffee-stained notebooks where I could find them. I got sober, put them all in a box and put the box on a shelf. Part of me hoped time would be kinder to me, that what sounded obnoxious then might end up being some kind of record of our time, but as the years passed, when I revisited the journals they didn't get better. Between the ages of 16 and 26 I was excruciatingly dull. I wince reading them.
I'm grateful I filled those books. I put in the hours and gradually learned to write the way I thought. That was a great relief. Now I sit and write and it sounds like me. I also know that not EVERY 25 year old writer is full of shit like I was. Some people are really good when they're young and I badly wanted to be one of those people! The words flowed out of me so easily onto the page but the ideas, the tone, the chronicle of our times, it's all the work of a kid trying to be someone he's not.
The problem is: I still cart these papers around, they fill boxes. I never want anyone to see them or to read them again but some notebooks are 40 years old and a part of me desperately wants them to mean something. I should have thrown them away decades ago. I have a lyric, "Twice you burned your life's work, once to start a new life and once just to start a fire." I wrote it about a friend who actually did burn her old writing. I was amazed by her, and admired her, but wasn't that brave.
If I'd burned them maybe I'd benefit now by thinking my young work was better than it was! Maybe leaving things behind is part of the myth-making we do to help sustain us. This pack-train of archives is like dragging every worn out pair of shoes behind me in a long chain. My daughter will gain no useful insight into me, my biographers (lol) will question their decision to document me at all. I should destroy them and be free of them, but sentimentality, or neo-animism, extinguishes the match.
All these papers are strewn across my living room floor at the moment in another failing attempt to consolidate my papers into a meaningfully small archive of good memories and seminal moments. I've never been closer to taking everything out to the fire pit. I have another friend who wrote prolifically for a local paper and a decade ago threw everything away, boxes and boxes, and he chided me to do the same, but I clung to my stacks as though throwing them away would be like throwing ME away.
Anyway, that's what I'm doing today instead of my taxes.
Roach@johnroderick Anything is better than doing taxes but looking back on your past writing is still beneficial even if it just showing how much you have grown over the years with the experiences that shaped you.