Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(49)

“What the government needs to do is take a sample of everyone’s DNA,” I said. “Then, when a bottle or can is discovered on the ground, we just run a test on the spout and throw the person in jail.”

“What if they’ve poured it into a glass?” Hugh asked.

And I said, “Why do you have to make this so difficult?”

It’s pathetic, really. Here we are, recent immigrants thinking that everything will be perfect once we fundamentally change the people who were actually born and raised here. I tell myself that it’s possible sometimes, though deep down I suspect it’s just rubbish.





Day In, Day Out




Seven is truly a wonderful age. For two days. That’s the length of time my friend Pam and her son, Tyler, who is in the second grade, normally visit. He’s at the stage where whatever I do, he wants to do. This includes wearing button-down shirts; singing “Galveston”—a song made popular by Glen Campbell—until everyone begs you to please, for the love of God, stop; and carrying a small Europa-brand reporter’s notebook. I gave him one the last time he came to the house in West Sussex, and, aping me, he stuck it in his pocket alongside a pen. That afternoon Hugh drove us to the nearby town of Arundel to tour its castle. There was an issue of the local paper in the backseat of the car, and leafing through it on our way there, I came upon a headline that read, “Dangerous Olives Could Be on Sale.”

“Hmm,” I said, and I copied it into my little notebook.

Tyler did the same but with less conviction. “Why are we doing this again?”

“It’s for your diary,” I explained. “You jot things down during the day, then tomorrow morning you flesh them out.”

“But why?” he asked. “What’s the point?”

That’s a question I’ve asked myself every day since September 5, 1977. I hadn’t known on September 4 that the following afternoon I would start keeping a diary, or that it would consume me for the next thirty-five years and counting. It wasn’t something I’d been putting off, but once I began, I knew that I had to keep doing it. I knew as well that what I was writing was not a journal but an old-fashioned, girlish, Keep-Out-This-Means-You diary. Often the terms are used interchangeably, though I’ve never understood why. Both have the word “day” at their root, but a journal, in my opinion, is a repository of ideas—your brain on the page. A diary, by contrast, is your heart. As for “journaling,” a verb that cropped up at around the same time as “scrapbooking,” that just means you’re spooky and have way too much time on your hands.

A few things have changed since that first entry in 1977, but I’ve never wavered in my devotion, skipping, on average, maybe one or two days a year. It’s not that I think my life is important or that future generations might care to know that on June 6, 2009, a woman with a deaf, drug-addicted mother-in-law taught me to say “I need you to stop being an *” in sign language. Perhaps it just feeds into my compulsive nature, the need to do the exact same thing at the exact same time every morning. Some diary sessions are longer than others, but the length has more to do with my mood than with what’s been going on. I met Gene Hackman once and wrote three hundred words about it. Six weeks later I watched a centipede attack and kill a worm and filled two pages. And I really like Gene Hackman.





In the beginning I wrote my diary on the backs of paper place mats. My friend Ronnie and I were hitchhiking up the West Coast at the time. I was mailing regular letters and postcards to my friends back home, but because I had no fixed address, no one could answer them. And so I began writing to myself. Those first several years are hard to reread, not because they’re boring—a diary is fully licensed to be boring—but because the writing is so horribly affected. It’s poetry written by someone who’s never read any poetry but seems to think its key is

lowercase letters

and lots of

empty

spaces.

I’d love to know how much it cost me to do a load of laundry—something, anything practical—but instead it’s all gibberish. I was living in places without locks on the doors, and perhaps I worried that if someone found my diary and discovered what I was actually like, they’d dismiss me as dull and middle-class, far from the artist I was making myself out to be. So instead of recounting my first day of work at the Carolina Coffee Shop, I wrote, “I did not see Star Wars,” one hundred times in red pen.

After a few months of place mats, I switched to hardcover sketchbooks and began gluing things around my entries: rent receipts, ticket stubs—ephemera that ultimately tell me much more than the writing does. Then came an embarrassing drawing phase, which was followed by a slightly less embarrassing collage jag. In 1979, I began typing my diaries, jerkily, with one finger, and having the pages bound between hand-painted cardboard covers. This meant that rather than writing publicly, most often in pancake houses, sometimes with a beret atop my head, I did it at home, in a real apartment now, with a lock on the door.

Perhaps it was this—the privacy—that allowed me to relax and settle into myself. In June of that year, I wrote that gas in four states had reached a dollar a gallon—“A dollar!” I wrote that after our German shepherd, M?dchen II, peed on my parents’ bed, my mother entered a new dimension of cursing by calling the dog, who was female, a “shitty motherf*cker.” Finally I was recording my world and writing down things that seemed worth remembering. Then I discovered crystal meth and took two giant steps backward. The following six diaries amount to one jittery run-on sentence, a fever dream as humorless as it is self-important. I tried rereading it recently and came away wondering, Who is this exhausting drug addict?