These are volumes 3 & 4 of my daily journal that I have kept since the 1980s.
Writing every single day is something I have been doing since 1975, my senior year in high school. It is why I claim to be a writer, even though I have never made enough money at it to even begin to think of myself as a professional writer. I kept a journal/diary/series of notebooks that I filled with junk I wrote and doodles in the margins up until the mid-90s when I began to put all my noodling into computer files instead of notebooks. I have millions of words piled in piles of notebooks and filling my hard drive to the point of “insufficient memory” errors on my laptop. I am now 69 years old and have been writing every day for 51 years.
There are days in the past where I only wrote a word, or a sentence or two. But there were a lot of words besides the words in my journal. I started my first novel in college. I completed it the summer before my first teaching job in 1981. I put it the closet, never to be thought of again, except when I needed a good cringe and cry at how terrible a writer I once was. I have been starting, stopping, percolating, piecing together, and eventually completing novel projects ever since… each one goofier and more wit-wacky than the last. So I have a closet full of those too.
It would be wrong of me to suggest that my journals are only for words. As a cartoon-boy-wannabee I doodle everywhere in margins and corners and parts of pages. Sometimes the doodle is an afterthought. Sometimes it precedes the paragraph. Sometimes it is directly connected to the words and their meaning.
Sometimes the work of art is the main thing itself.
But always, the habit of writing down words and ideas every single day takes precedence over every other part of my day. That’s the main reason I am stupid enough to think of myself as a writer even though I don’t make a living by writing.
But I did put my words into my profession too. As a teacher of writing, I wrote with and to my students. I did that for 31 years as a classroom teacher, and two years as a substitute. I required them each to keep a daily journal (though they only got graded for the ones they wrote in class, and then only for reaching the amount of words assigned). We shared the writing aloud in class, making only positive comments. I wrote every assignment I gave them, including the journal entries. They got to see and hear what I could write, and it often inspired them or gave them a structure to hang their own ideas upon. And often they liked what I wrote and were surprised by it almost as much as I liked and was surprised by theirs. Being a writer was never a total waste of time and effort.
So am I telling you that if you want to be writer you have to write every day too? If I have to tell you that… you have totally missed the point.
During my middle-school teaching years I also bought and read copies of The Prince and the Pauper, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi. I would later use a selection from Roughing It as part of a thematic unit on Mark Twain where I used Will Vinton’s glorious claymation movie, The Adventures of Mark Twain as a way to painlessly introduce my kids to the notion that Mark Twain was funny and complex and wise.
Catch a Falling Star 
Just Call Me Joe
This post is from 2016 and reflects that time and the present.
Yes, the rain clouds are hanging over my old gray head. I am plunged deeply back into credit card debt by increases in property taxes, a lawsuit by Bank of America, and the city forcing me to get the cracked pool repaired. However, I can’t afford to do anything more than fix it myself, and rain keeps refilling it, a recent car accident, my wife forgetting to pay the phone bill for two months, and the @#%&! family dog chewing up another of my son’s expensive retainers. Good fortune occurs once in a blue moon, but bad fortune comes in daily waves.
So today is about complaining. Life sucks… in the sense of a vacuum cleaner (the addendum I always had to add as a school teacher whenever the word “sucks” was used in class). Life especially sucks (remember… vacuum cleaner) now that we have a dyspeptic orangutan running our country. (Again!)
The answer, of course, is that we simply have to live with it. Life will go on. At least, until it doesn’t. We are all going to die someday. Humanity and life on Earth will become extinct someday. We live within the borders of birth and death. The beginning and the end.
But life is actually like a book. It begins and ends. But the important part is the pages in between. And we can fill them with good things and lots of love and even more laughter. Hmm, maybe I should stop complaining now.
So, now, in 2025, we must reach out for life, love, and laughter again.
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Filed under commentary, Depression, feeling sorry for myself, humor, self pity, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as bad luck, complaints, humor, Joe BTFSPLK