editing the past (wouldn’t it be nice)

This morning I worked on my fiction project, with no plans to burn any oil on this one. I did, however, look through a very bloated folder of journal entries, deleting several. If this is a record of who I was, there doesn’t seem much point to a lot of these younger musings. Some of them are trite, others just boring, repetitive and derivative. Young, I guess. When I think about how and what I want to leave this earth, it’s not stuff like that.

People say they wish they could do their lives over all the time. I have plenty, more so since medication for the narcolepsy showed me how unnecessary so much of my personal drama was. It’s like when your friends tell you during a crying jag when you’re hammered, “let’s talk about this tomorrow, when you haven’t had this much to drink.” I can’t think of a single time some intoxicated urgency gave way to a genuine issue or emergency.

I think when I’ve said I wish I could do it all over, and others probably too, it’s about how you would do things differently. Lately though, I know I would have mostly done fewer things. Around our house we’re a big fan of Mike Birbiglia’s gag, “what I should have said was nothing.” With my youthful records I see pretty clearly what I lacked most was intention. I was almost always reacting to something. There was consideration and thought, and I wasn’t a total idiot, but there was seldom a realistic view of the future. I mean, the old posts that embarrass me the most are the life to do lists, new year’s resolution type stuff. It seems so lacking in actionable items, just dreams and this idea that willpower was where all these things could happen.

I have to go to the allergist. That’s enough for today.