I Kept Journals

Off and on throughout my life, I have been a writer. I guess you could say that I am a writer. Among other things, I kept journals. I still keep journals. I just don’t write in them as much as I used to (although I’m working on getting back into the habit).

Snoopy, the Red Baron, and Me

When I was a young child, my “journals” took the form of short stories of Snoopy and the Red Baron. Complete with drawings of dog fights (haha!) with bullets zipping through the air. Snoopy’s doghouse spiraling: sometimes up, sometimes down. The Red Baron zigging and zagging. Ilustrated stories that I call “journals” because often, how things were going for me determined how things went for Snoopy.

In addition to the fight scenes, sometimes my drawings were of maps. After all, if you go down, you need to find your way home afoot! To this day, I occasionally like to doodle maps.

As alluded to, I was Snoopy. Fighting to stay in the sky. Aiming to take the Red Baron out of the sky. But, although I was Snoopy—I was otherwise myself—I was frequently shot out of the sky. Down the doghouse would spiral, a stream of smoke trailing behind. Maybe two. Maybe more.

Alas, poor Snoopy….

Somehow, Snoopy and the Red Baron were lost on one of our trips cross-country. (My dad was a career Navy man, and we moved across the country more than once.) The last time I saw them, they were in a folder under the driver’s seat of our pale green Rambler station wagon. I guess I forgot to leave a map in the folder, because they never made it to the new house.

After arriving in California, I stopped writing about Snoopy and the Red Baron. I wrote some poetry—you can read a little about that here—and one of my favorite poetic efforts is this one I wrote in high school, inspired by an entry about suicide in a thesaurus.*

Semi-NonFiction Journals

When I got older, I kept journals that you’d probably more readily identify as journals. This was especially true around my late 20s, I think, until my early 40s (maybe? I’d have to look). During that period, I used spiral-bound notebooks. The 5-subject kind, only mine just had one subject: whatever was flowing through my head to my hand to the pen to the page.

Oh, and I always wrote/write with a fountain pen. If somehow I couldn’t find my fountain pen (which was very rare), I would refuse to write. I might not be as picky these days; I don’t know. That said, I’m seldom far from my fountain pen.

All that journaling was possible because I owned a medical transcription business for about 15-20 years. The work took me just a few hours a day. Then I’d spend the rest of the day in school—six years’ worth—at CSU Fresno, or sitting at Carl’s Jr., where I kept journals.**

The dry Spell

Then I got really sporadic. For many, many years, I stopped journaling altogether. I took up blogging, first at Unspun™ which, for those who don’t know, was started initially as a counterpoint to that great Bullshit Artist, Bill O’Reilly, and his fictional “no-spin zone.” Then, when I was about half-way through law school, I started Probable Cause: The Legal Blog with the Really Low Standard of Review. After becoming a lawyer, that became the blogging portion of RHDefense: The Law Office of Rick Horowitz.

But periodically, I long for those old days at Carl’s, and I’ll get back to journaling in my notebooks for a minute. Yet I feel like I’m always writing the modern version of Snoopy and the Red Baron, fighting, spiraling—mostly down—leaving behind trails of smoke, and so….

My current journal was started in 2017. It looks like it has just enough paper in it for another day, or maybe two if I don’t write much. Then I’ll get a new one.

That said, my last three entries have approximately one year between each of them. We’ll see how many more I can fill before I kick off.

My Father Moves On

I use my journals and my blogs for all kinds of things these days. Philosophizing, observations on the law, cops, judges, and our criminally-unjust injustice system, self-psychoanalyzing, generalized ramblings, whining, bragging, and occasionally recording things that are happening in my life.

As for my journals, the first of the last three entries was done the day after my father died. He and I had patched things up long before that. For a while, we were actually even what you might call friends. Whenever I had a case in Kings County—he retired to Hanford after the Navy—we’d meet at Denny’s after for coffee, maybe some eggs and toast for brunch.

Then I became estranged for the third and last time from my entire family.*** By then, my father was deep into Alzheimer’s. I doubt he even knew I wasn’t around anymore.

Anyway, the day after he died, I drove to the Denny’s in Clovis near my home. I ordered two plates of food: mine, and his—what we each always ate. I sat and cried—the waitress kept coming to see if I was okay, and I finally had to tell her what had happened, and explain the second, untouched plate—and I journaled about him. Most of it was good.

One story, which I might tell here someday, was maybe not so good. Yet it’s one of two that you might call “origin stories.” The kind that helps you know how I became who I am today. As a person, I mean. My thoughts on it are bittersweet. I’m actually working on writing both those stories up as a piece of “creative nonfiction.” If I get it done, I’ll post it on this blog.

When I finished that journal entry, I boxed up the meal my father left untouched and took it home to Bunny Chafowitz.

Father’s Gone; Father Time Keeps Tickin’

A few days ago, for no reason at all, I was thinking about how quickly life seems to be going by. I remembered a conversation I had once with my father.

Before I tell you about that, though, I should tell you that when I was 17, I ran away from home. The night it happened, my father and I had had (another) argument. The details are not important. Suffice it to say it was over a little bit of fatherly hypocrisy. And the end of that was he said that if I couldn’t live by his rules, I could get out of his house.

As his rules frequently seemed to me to be arbitrary and changeable, there was only one choice in my mind. Who can live by arbitrary and changeable?

I left. That was our first estrangement.

We patched things up as I mentioned above, for some years. He signed for me to go into the Navy when I was just about to turn 18. And for a long time after we had a good relationship.

There was an intervening second estrangement after—well, the details aren’t important, and didn’t involve anything he did.

And then, in my fifties, we were having this conversation I said I’d tell you about. We were sitting in a car at a park, just chatting. I asked, “Hey, do you remember when I was 17, and I ran away from home?”

“Of course,” he said.

“I couldn’t wait less than a year to turn 18 and just leave ‘normally,’ without running away.”

He nodded.

“Well, it’s funny, because now, in my fifties, if someone comes to me with a project or a proposal, and they say, ‘You’ll have a year to get it done.’ My first question is, ‘If I need more time, can I have it? A year isn’t that long.'”

There was a slight pause, and my father said, “Wait until you’re in your seventies.”

My father was 81 when he died. He was buried with military honors in the San Joaquin Valley National Cemetary in Santa Nella, California.

In a Hundred Years?

He used to like to say, “In a hundred years, who will know the difference?” Ironically—and you’ll understand this more if I ever get that creative nonfiction piece done—that’s another piece of his arbitrariness, or changeableness. Although, to be fair, as he got older, he changed. I think he really did become more of a “who will know?” guy.

But a hundred years. That’s actually not that much time. When I was thinking a few days ago, for no reason at all, about how quickly life seems to be going by (as I mentioned above), it occurred to me that if you went backwards from my birth the same number of years that I have lived forwards, you’d arrive at 1892.

Eighteen-ninety-two!

Very likely, that means there were people—not many, maybe, but some—alive when I became alive, who witnessed the Civil War. Not only that, but there might have been some people alive when I was alive who had known people who had lived through the Revolutionary War!

But with all that, I have to say that I think my father was wrong. I mean, for those big things—”there was a war”—most people in a hundred years might know the difference. Yet, people will not remember most of us who lived through those events even half that long.

People will forget my blogs long before a hundred years have passed.They’ll probably vanish from the Innertubes within a year or so after my passing, what with no one to pay the hosting companies. More than a million words I’ve written will vanish.

My paper journals might last a little longer. It depends. I have no one to pass them on to. Unless something I can’t imagine happens, they’ll likely end up in a landfill. If they do, that fountain pen ink won’t withstand the moisture. While I slowly disintegrate within my grave (or will I be cremated? well, either way), my words will also soon become part of the soil.

Ironically, Snoopy and the Red Baron will still be fighting it out, somewhere.

Me? Well, I kept journals…and then I was gone.

Notes

*I don’t remember why I ran across that, but to show what a dweeb I was, I used to read the dictionary and the thesaurus for fun.

**I also recently found a couple journals I kept as a student assignment for certain classes, including an anthropology class. I should regale you some day with some of those entries.

***My youngest sister and I stay in touch. Nobody else.