Theft by Finding

Not long after deciding to release a book of diary entries, I came upon a five-pound note. I’d been picking up trash alongside a country road in West Sussex, and there it was between a potato-chip bag and a half-full beer can that had drowned slugs in it. Given the exchange rate, the bill amounted to around $8.15, which, as my mother would have said, “Ain’t nothing.” A few days later I met with my friend Pam in London. The subject of windfalls came up, and when I mentioned the money she asked if I’d spent it.

“Well, of course,” I said.

“In the U.K., if you discover something of value and keep it, that’s theft by finding,” she told me. “You’re supposed to investigate whether it was lost or stolen, though in this case—five pounds—of course you’re fine.”

Theft by Finding. It was, I thought, the perfect title for this book. When it comes to subject matter, all diarists are different. I was never one to write about my feelings, in part because they weren’t that interesting (even to me) but mainly because they were so likely to change. Other people’s feelings, though, that was a different story. Got a bone to pick with your stepmother or the manager of the place where you worked until yesterday? Please, let’s talk!

If nothing else, a diary teaches you what you’re interested in. Perhaps at the beginning you restrict yourself to issues of social injustice or all the unfortunate people trapped beneath the rubble in Turkey or Italy or wherever the last great earthquake hit. You keep the diary you feel you should be keeping, the one that, if discovered by your mother or college roommate, would leave them thinking, If only I was as civic-minded/bighearted/philosophical as Edward!

After a year, you realize it takes time to rail against injustice, time you might better spend questioning fondue or describing those ferrets you couldn’t afford. Unless, of course, social injustice is your thing, in which case—knock yourself out. The point is to find out who you are and to be true to that person. Because so often you can’t. Won’t people turn away if they know the real me? you wonder. The me that hates my own child, that put my perfectly healthy dog to sleep? The me who thinks, deep down, that maybe The Wire was overrated?*

What I prefer recording at the end—or, more recently, at the start—of my day are remarkable events I have observed (fistfights, accidents, a shopper arriving with a full cart of groceries in the express lane), bits of overheard conversation, and startling things people have told me. These people could be friends but just as easily barbers, strangers on a plane, or cashiers. A number of their stories turned out to be urban legends: the neighbor of a relative whose dead cat was stolen from the trunk of a car, etc. I hope I’ve weeded those out. Then there are the jokes I’ve heard at parties and book signings over the years. They were obviously written by someone—all jokes are—but the authors are hardly ever credited in the retelling.

Another thing I noticed while going through my forty years of diaries is that many of the dates are wrong. For instance, there might be three October 1, 1982s. This was most likely because I didn’t know what day it was. Time tends to melt and run together when you don’t have a job. In that prelaptop era, you had to consult a newspaper or calendar to find out if it was Wednesday the eighth or Thursday the ninth. This involved getting up, so more often than not, I’d just stay put and guess. Quite often I’d even get the month wrong.

It might look like my average diary entry amounts to no more than seven sentences, but in fact I spend an inordinate amount of time writing about my day—around forty-five minutes, usually. If nothing big happened, I’ll reflect on a newspaper article or a report I heard on the radio. I’m not big on weather writing but have no policy against it. Thus when life gets really dull, I’ll just look out the window and describe the color of the sky. That will lead to something else, most often: a bird being mean to another bird or the noise a plane makes.

Starting around 1979 I began numbering my entries. It’s a habit I still maintain.

December 28, 2016

This is what cavemen did before paragraphs were invented, and I’m not sure why I don’t just indent or hit the space bar twice. Another old-fashioned practice I maintain is carrying a notebook, a small one I keep in my shirt pocket and never leave the house without. In it I register all the little things that strike me, not in great detail but just quickly. The following morning I’ll review what I jotted down and look for the most meaningful moment in the previous day, the one in which I felt truly present. It could have been seeing an old friend, or just as likely it could have been watching a stranger eat a sandwich with his eyes closed. (That happened recently, and was riveting.)

Every so often, I’ll record something that might entertain or enlighten someone, and those are the bits I set aside. I thought I’d eventually put them in a book of diary entries, but when the printout reached a height of eight inches, I decided that maybe two volumes—the second of which will cover the years 2003 to 2017—would make more sense. It’s worth mentioning that this is my edit. Of the roughly eight million words handwritten or typed into my diary since September 5, 1977, I’m including only a small fraction. An entirely different book from the same source material could make me appear nothing but evil, selfish, generous, or even, dare I say, sensitive. On any given day I am all these things and more: stupid, cheerful, misanthropic, cruel, narrow-minded, open, petty—the list goes on and on.

A different edit, no doubt a more precise one, would have involved handing my diary over to someone else, but that is something I can’t imagine doing, unless, perhaps, that person is a journalist. (They never get beyond the third page, which they usually call “the middle,” as in “I’d hoped to finish this before our interview but am only in the middle!”)

That said, I don’t really expect anyone to read this from start to finish. It seems more like the sort of thing you might dip in and out of, like someone else’s yearbook or a collection of jokes.

It wasn’t easy revisiting what are now 156 volumes of my diary. I broke the job up—a month or two per day—but after reading about me, I’d have to spend the rest of the day being me. I don’t know that I’ve ever done anything quite so exhausting. Hugh would be in the next room and hear me shout things like “Will you just shut up!” and “Who cares about the goddamn pocket square!”

“Who are you talking to?” he’d ask.

“Me in 2001,” I’d answer.

By then I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. The early years, 1977 to 1983, were the bleakest. I was writing my diaries by hand back then. The letters were small and, fueled by meth, a typical entry would go on for pages—solid walls of words, and every last one of them complete bullshit. I’ve included very little of that time in this book. It’s like listening to a crazy person. The gist is all you need, really.

The diary lightened up when I moved to Chicago, partly because I was in a big city but mainly because I felt so much better about myself. I’d finally done what I’d talked about doing for so many years: I’d left the town I grew up in. I’d gone back to college and actually graduated. There was all the more reason to feel good when, in the fall of 1990, I moved to New York. I was only writing at night back then, either smashed or getting there. You’d think I’d have addressed my drinking, at least in the privacy of my diary, but it’s rarely mentioned. To type that word—alcoholic—would have made it real, so I never recounted the talking-tos I got from Hugh and certain helpful people in my family.

Similarly, it took me a while in the 1970s to write the word gay. “Oh, please,” I said out loud to my twenty-year-old self while reading my earliest diaries. “Who do you think you’re kidding?”

This project made evident all the phases I’ve gone through over the years, and how intensely. Oh, the ink that was spilled over finding the correct phone number of someone who’d obviously—and for good reason—given me a fake one, over losing weight, over my French homework. Later I’d throw myself into catching flies and feeding them to spiders, and all this leads me to wonder, What’s next? Judging from my past it could be anything: collecting hair, crossbreeding rodents in my basement—who knows?

I was also struck while rereading my diaries by the number of people I knew in 1980 whom I’m still close with now. It’s so hard to predict which friends will last and which will fade away. Quite often I’d move and lose half the contacts in my address book, people I thought would be with me forever. It’s not that we outgrew one another. They just couldn’t be bothered to put a stamp on a letter. Or I couldn’t. Of course it’s easier now with email.

It was interesting to read back through a diary and come upon someone who would wind up being very important, who would drop out of nowhere and change the direction of my life: Hugh, Jim McManus, Meryl Vladimer, Geoff Kloske, Ira Glass, Andy Ward. I’d have thought the initial meetings would be momentous, that I’d recognize salvation when it presented itself—“There you are!”—but more often than not, each of them was just someone I shook hands with, then sat down later at my desk thinking, What was that person’s name again? Hugh was different. Him I remembered. With the others, though, it’s sort of heartening. You never know whose hand you’re going to shake.

Then there were those who died: my mother, my sister Tiffany, Don Congdon, the lovely David Rakoff. I’d reread the entries that featured these people and curse myself for not including more. Why did I not transcribe their every word? And shouldn’t I get cracking so that when friends and family members die in the future I’ll have something greater and more comforting to reflect upon? That’s the thing with a diary, though. In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it. Not at your desk, but beyond it. Out in the world where it’s so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it.