Raising Cain

 Oh, snap. . . The temptation of having a smaller, text-oriented page, on an account that far fewer people follow, is to just start journaling again. 

I've kept journals for over fifteen years. I think it started when my mom got me a blank diary from a stationary sale: what got me hooked was that this little hardbound book came complete with a lock and key, the illusion of privacy in a family with five other kids combined with the pipe dream that this was a way of someone actually listening to things I had to say. I started pouring my heart out into that little book, and when I'd worked out the "big things" in my own head this way, I'd copy parts of them down onto a sheaf of multi-colored paper as letters to family members when I didn't want to talk to them. Because talking's hard, man, but not having any outlet for your thoughts at all means no way of working them out, either. 

The journals just got bigger and bigger as I grew older. I started carrying around five-subject notebooks, where one section was for my journal, one was for story ideas, one was for drafts or poetry, and the other two were for actually writing out whatever "novel" was foremost in my head that year. And even when I outgrew those early illusions of privacy and intimacy in a piece of paper, I still kept writing to my journals as frankly as I had when I still had the one with a lock and key. Today, I have no illusions that they were never read: I just don't know who read them. I also know that there were at least two times when I pulled out one of the oldest ones and sat reading parts of it to whoever would listen. Trying to entertain? Gain approval? I don't know, but I wish I hadn't done it. 

Anyway. When I finally moved out of my parents' house a few years back, I probably had ten five-subject notebooks and a whole bunch of smaller ones to shake my head over. I thought I couldn't take them all with me, and I was trying to pack up quick because I was also coming out to my parents in the next few days, and I had no idea how they were going to react, what they might try and take as leverage for - I don't know what for. So I piled up fifteen years' worth of journals and just started ripping them apart, judging what I could fit in a suitcase or my shitty car to take with me. And now all I have left are the journal sections: most of the smaller first books, and then the journal sections of the larger notebooks. Everything is just paperclipped together and tossed in ziploc bags in some weird thought of preserving the paper. I keep meaning to digitize them somehow, but they're already ripped and faded; my best bet might be to type up everything up by hand. But what's the point of that? Right now I'm hanging on to everything because that's what I had, that's what I did, once upon a time. I don't know if making a copy of it all would serve any point. 

Anyway again! This potential move off tumblr is giving me the same vibes, I guess. I put so much on there, and the old blog's value is as much from it being the original medium I put everything in, as it is the content itself. I had that blog before I started my Ph.D. - all my first day of school (again again) stuff is on there, my top surgery anniversary freakout is on there, the exchange of comments that led to a really amazing friendship is on there, all alongside the awesome content from other creators and a bunch of other personal things including my own work. I'm trying not to fall into theorizing my own damn fool self here, but if I were to go down that rabbit hole I might ask if this is what Benjamin's notion of the aura has come to in an age of digital, not just mechanical, reproduction. Idk, man. Idk. I just have a lot of feelings about it and that little spiral notebook I bought the other night to start a new journal in is still sitting unopened by my bed while Dreamwidth is right here. 

I'm only here for Season of Kink 2018. . .