About My Journal

What do I call this work? Narrative blog? Online diary?

Feels like jargon.

I just like to write. (But I’m often busy or distracted.)

This is not a story.

Stories are about life’s great determining choices and events. (In the novel Middlemarch by George Eliot three couples are united and a leading citizen is disgraced, exiled, punished.)

I love the novel Middlemarch, but my Penguin edition of Middlemarch has 838 pages excluding notes. So I listened to Middlemarch through the earbuds of my iPhone while driving to work.

Those are things we love to read or talk about.

Because we love to gossip.

We are social animals. We live with others. We nose around other lives.

But authors know too much.

Our actual knowledge of others is partial, fragmentary. Our trails only intersect occasionally.

In my journal I can only tell what I see or hear.

If I see someone for one hour a week I am only observing 1.3% of his or her  life.

So I make guesses. I get things wrong, I change my mind.

I may not understand you. I may not understand myself.