Hypergraphia

Wednesday is about books and writing, and reading. Today, writing. Writing. Writing. Writing. Writing.

Every day of every year of high school — broadly speaking age 13 through 18, I kept a diary. They weren’t important writings, they probably weren’t all that embarrassing either — but I can say that now that they’re no longer in existence, so no threat of them ever being discovered or published or mined in any way at all. I kept them for several years, in a drawer by my bed, then in a box in a storage space, eventually I decided they weren’t worth anything at all, and only served to bug me by being around. The thought of them. The idea that they had to be held in some way, protected from being further published — technically they existed already; borne of my thoughts, so published, even if kept private.

One day, and it wasn’t all that long ago, but who knows maybe it was five or ten years ago perhaps, I cut the pages from them, and home-shredded them for the recycle bin.

In fact I’d even kept a diary in my first year of university, so I guess that was up until the age of 19 then. That final diary was probably the most embarrassing of the lot; days would go by in a fug of student-night prices at bars and next days spent dodging class to attend the latest action flick, or to catch the hair of the dog that bit me and put it in a pint glass and drink it back down once more. And I’d forget to update the diary at all, though clearly it wasn’t worth it — but on a Sunday night or Monday lunchtime now and then I’d try to catch up for two or three weeks that had passed, and I’d file a few words for each day. Too often they were so, so trivial.

But anyway, that year aside, I had lists in the back of each diary where I kept track of the albums I bought and listened to, the books I read, and the movies I saw.

Which was ultimately my training for this right here, and the blogs on Stuff and other websites that were further training grounds.

So, it was a happy parting of the diaries and me. They had served their purpose very much. They had got me writing, and kept me at it. They had created routine.

Of course there were poems and stories on the side, and the various journalisms too for a bit. I wasn’t always a reviewer, but I was almost always thinking about it. In my first year of high school I wrote imaginary album reviews, making up bands and ideas for records and giving them critique. In the years that followed I would write my own reviews of classic records that didn’t need any further words wasted on them — Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and The Beatles and Lou Reed and Fleetwood Mac and Genesis and John Coltrane and Miles Davis.

I wrote about Emmylou Harris as soon as I discovered here. Only about 25 years after she released her first album of course.

Somewhere there are folders of poetry still that I cannot bear to look at but also cannot throw away. They’re best locked away forever I’m sure. I sometimes think I could go through them to find a gem or two, or an idea that could translate to now, a seed for something. I then realise the time spent would not be worth it, but to toss them in the bin is to admit to some failure there. When in fact those poems, typed on an old electric machine, and saved for more than 30 years now, speak to not only an obsession, but confirm a type of careful practice. I wrote the thousands of poems that sit in those folders in a crate in an attic for so many reasons — and learned a lot about the version of myself that wrote them. And thought that version of me knew more than he did. But I also learned a lot of rules while breaking a bunch I never even got to know. And I listened to a lot of great music while doing so, and taught myself a lot about that along the way too; how to listen and how to respond and how to sit with myself for long periods.

But, yeah, back to the diaries.

At some point the diaries became blogs, or were replaced by them I mean. And then social media was new/ish and was there to promote the blogs and other writing — until it became its own form of writing, micro-blogging or indeed some form of ‘content’ — which always feels like the cruellest word you can call a piece of writing. I understand what creating content is, but I’m not sure I should ever feel good about having my work called that, let alone slumming it to use that title myself.

The blogging gave way to these newsletters on Substack — just a new form of blogging, or the true form of it, or just another name. But it’s funny to think that I have largely stayed so focussed on music and movies and books. On poetry and stories and writing about writing. These are the things that have kept me both in this world, and away in my own world for well over 30 years now. For getting close to 40 years actually. And obviously there was a training ground before that, writing stories in primary school and as a pre-schooler too. Writing whatever I thought needed to be written, and especially whatever I wanted to write.

I’m not done yet. Of course. It’s been one of my biggest years of writing. I would hit out tens of thousands of words every week, no exaggeration — and in various guises, for many different reasons. But at the end of analysis, there’s maybe just the one reason: It’s something I am hoping to still learn how to do. It is something that teaches me about myself. It is something I feel compelled to do, driven to — in both maddening and relaxing ways. And yeah, that’s actually (technically) a bunch of reasons, but it’s really also just one.

And it all ultimately comes back to those diaries I think.

They did their work. And now I’m still doing that work because of them. They served their purpose. And it was right to move on from them. To donate them to the bin. I’m still chasing the chance to pin down whatever butterflies I thought I caught when writing those entries way back whenever…

And to say those diaries were not important isn’t true at all. What’s in them might not mean so much, but that I filled them — that’s what mattered most at the time, and maybe more so now. Holding on them was never the point. Remembering that I did that work, and the routine it built, that’s what it was about. Doing my very best at the time. Even if it was fucking embarrassing.