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Greetings, writers—
Keeping a journal sharpens our senses. It’s like physical exercise through language. Otherwise, precious thoughts that drift into your mind, unexpected revelations and recollections may just evaporate and be lost. (This is one of the motives for writing fiction, especially novels: the fiction becomes a container for much that might be otherwise lost.) —Joyce Carol Oates
I’m with JCO here: I think everyone should keep a journal.
I’ve been writing in the same Word document since I moved to Portland in 2005, and by now it’s nearly 300,000 words—as long as The Goldfinch, which I haven’t read, but not as long as A Little Life, ditto, just to name a few doorstopper bestsellers, as if they bear any relationship to my private, quotidian musings, which obviously they do not.
But, in the spirit of sharing, here’s something I wrote ten years ago, which I happened to come across when I was looking for something else.
I cleaned up the typos, made some paragraph breaks, and added the capital letters I’m normally too lazy to bother with, but otherwise this is the entry as I found it.
Tonight because I got half-drunk with a lady I know from my gym I walked out to Hawthorne Avenue where I let a stranger rotate my chakras on the sidewalk in front of the smoothie shop. This stranger informed me that he possessed “really strong qi,” and that he had been chosen as an acolyte by the Dalai Lama. He’d “done that whole thing” where he lived in a temple and slept on boards with his hands in a mudra shape so as not to lose the qi he’d acquired during the day. “Everything is meditation,” he said. “The highest form of martial art is mediation.”
His name was Rock Man Jon, and he sold crystals at electronica shows and rotated the chakras of people on acid, which he said was fun. I found it hard to be out there on the street, getting my chakras rotated with all the traffic and the buses, not to mention the people walking by looking at us. “Imagine how hard it is for me,” said Rock Man Jon.
But I really did feel something: a hot ball of energy, maybe. Rotating, maybe. Rock Man said that only this feeling was reality, and that everything else was an illusion. He said he hoped that I had stone or wood floors in my house, because concrete was an insulator that blocked the flow of qi and electricity. This was why we felt so much better when we took off our shoes and walked in the grass.
Rock Man Jon also told me that he lived for a year on the streets of New York City in a $10,000 Perry Ellis suit. The deal was, how clean could he keep it? Every time there was a spot, he would run and wash it off. “Where did you sleep?” I asked. He said, “I didn’t really sleep. I meditated. In the snow1 I would meditate beneath stoops.” He said he barely ate, either. But he taught “the punkers in Tompkins Square” how to meditate and do qi gong.
Now, Rock Man Jon said, he rents a little house in Cannon Beach, and he’s the official broker of sunstones. “The sunstone mine picked me,” he said. As the Dalai Lama had.
I don’t know if it was the wine I’d had before meeting Rock Man Jon or the chakra rotation he performed, but I bought $80 worth of crystals from him, which are now glittering in three different rooms of my house.
People, I never, ever, ever would’ve remembered this experience, even though the crystals I bought from Rock Man Jon (or Rockman John? I didn’t ask how he spelled it) are still in my office, the living room, and one of the bathrooms.
I had also forgotten my gym friend, and the time Jon (my Jon, not Rockman Jon) and I took the kids to Peterson’s Rock Garden, where you could buy geodes and sunstones, and where an ostentation of peacocks roamed the grounds, screaming.2 That was a really great day.
The point is, if a single entry can spark a pile of memories that would have otherwise—in JCO’s words—evaporated and been lost, shouldn’t we all be better about writing things down? These are our lives we’re talking about, and it’s really important to remember them.
Your writing prompt this week is to keep a detailed daily journal. If you already do this, make your entries longer and more expansive. Be an eavesdropper and a transcriptionist. Write down things that happened to you years ago or things you hope happen next year. Transcribe a joke, critique a movie, describe a friend, lodge a complaint, craft an ode. Whatever.
Aim for 200 words a day.
Happy writing,
Emily
I think this is right? The journal actually says “in the slow”
Flannery O’Connor loved peacocks. In her 1961 essay “Living with a Peacock,” she wrote, “I intend to stand firm and let the peacocks multiply, for I am sure that, in the end, the last word will be theirs.” And their last word will be a blood-curdling shriek, I guess.