When I was young and  in my early twenties, I mean, after having spent five years studying at the fine academy of Berkeley in California in the seventies and read so many great books by great authors, (many of them not assigned by any course I took but found them in the outdoor wooden racks of used book stores along Telegraph avenue), I decided I should someday become a writer, an author myself because I admired those individual authors so much. But I had no idea how to go about it, no clue, no plot for a novel. So I commenced by jotting down little notes in a notebook I started carrying in my pocket, pieces of scenes that struck me as something different, something worthy of note, maybe for some unknown future reader.

Looking over these disjointed entries, most often only a sentence or two long, I could neither make heads or tales. But the habit took hold, like a mushroom growing in the lawn, and I started recording in more detail conversations I shared with friends or sometimes strangers as if living in an alien land. I suppose this is the seed of journalism. But I had no aspirations to that career. I wanted the life stories of nobodies, of no importance in the world because I knew that from that well, the greatest novelists ever, Dostoevsky and Emile Zola, created their masterpieces, Crime and Punishment, and Germinal.

I became a Bohemian at 23, lowered myself into the gutters one might say, when I had a very promising university career in my pocket and the smarts and the respect of all my professors to effect it. Good old Steven Crane, with his novella, "Maggie, a woman of the streets" and a far more obscure and far more intelligent being, David Rhunken, from 18th century Holland, in a book he entitled "De Doctore Umbratico" ripped apart the myth of university study and stated that any book that doesn't teach you valuable lessons in guiding your life is a complete waste of time, changed my mind. I'm getting long winded here, but my point is; I agreed with their words and hitchhiked into a complete and wonderfully educating unknown, fortunately scribbling notes as I went, with my cheap little notebooks always lying on some scrappy table nearby.

I can hardly believe the wealth of information in these pads, over forty years after I collected them, the pages of my diaries.

Pictures, Polaroids, may come close to them but who owns a page of a blood stained sheet from the distant past, a Saturday night, October 1982, the red stains from the straw of a nosebleed of an extremely beautiful woman, after too much cocaine that night, she leaning over my open notebook and holding my shoulder, trying to read what I wrote, right next to the mirror with the lines, the DNA probably still recoverable.

Behold the wonder:

A page of a notebook can be a telling page of history, and a few drips of blood on it far more telling than any words, along with the sloppy handwriting which is an exact mirror of the slurred words of one who is inebriated yet trying desperately to make sense of my world then and there.

We are a bit far removed from such primitive forms of recording. But I encourage everyone thirty and forty years younger than me to do something in some other medium or a way to record their life, digitally, with the long-shot hope, that decades later you will revel in the remembrance, as I have done.

here is the link to my autobiography when this takes place. From it, further links at the bottom of each post lead you to the next or the previous, if you wish to read more:

https://www.publish0x.com/robert-oreilly/gorilla-biscuits-xnnplen