I am sometimes reluctant to expose too much of myself in this blog. Then, other times I lapse into an ardent, navel-gazing confessionalism. This morning, while looking for some writeable DVDs in my closet (which I never found, though I distinctly remember purchasing them), I happened across one of my old paper journals which had gotten separated from the main collection. This collection I carry around with me, and on rare occasions I will dig into it, fish something out, and use it in some way: for my current efforts at novel-writing or to “retroblog” it here in bloggolandia. I suppose it’s a bit autobiographical, but because of the need to sometimes guess at the date or context of a given bit of writing or drawing, it’s really more like “autoarcheology.”
The journal I found was from 1983~1984 (my first year of college), with some loose pages inserted, oddly, from 1998. Actually, finding loose pages from 1998 happens all the time to me – that year was quite prolific in journal-writing terms (perhaps my most prolific, at least until blogification) but the year was also intensely disorganized, hence the loose-leaf pages have ended up in all kinds of strange or unexpected places.
How everything – this whole collection – has managed to follow me to Korea might seem a bit mysterious. In fact, I was more organized at some point in the early 2000’s, and I had consolidated all my paper writing in a clearly marked box, which, when I realized my stay in Korea was evolving towards permanency in 2009, I mailed to myself. Once the box arrived here, however, it exploded in several bouts of nostalgia and its contents has since been fairly evenly distributed among my boxes and closets and folders here in Korea.
After a mostly unproductive, cancerous year, my retroblog has seemed nigh moribund. I decided to post two things I ran across this morning. One is a rather-compelling (to me, anyway – YMMV) bit of poemy prose from winter, 1984, and the other is a drawing with accompanying enigmatic inscription from the previous summer.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]