“We generate stories for you because you don’t save the ones that are yours.” - Douglas Coupland

There are a couple of reasons why I started this journal. I’d like to think that vanity isn’t one of them. The most compelling one is that Nadra went away to Germany for six months one year, and expected letters. So to keep her a part of my everyday life while she was away, and avoid an almighty ass-kicking when she got home, I started keeping a journal. I discovered it was fun; I actually enjoyed the act of writing - it forced me to think a bit more, and a bit differently, about what I do every day.

The other thing is that, as I get older, I feel my life slipping away. There are whole chunks of my past I don’t really remember. Not like I blacked out for a year, but I just don’t remember any significant events. I know where I was living and working, but I couldn’t tell you any stories. Or, there are events that I remember, but I couldn’t even tell you which year it was.

So most of the stuff here is just the details of my life. If you’re not already part of it, this is probably all pretty boring. Even if you are, it’s probably mostly boring. This is as much self-anthropology as anything else. In The Clock of the Long Now, Stewart Brand talks about how Chinese monks, to preserve a record of their culture, inscribed the Buddhist scriptures on a huge collection of stone tablets. Brand comments that, “Better still would have been a reverently preserved sequential archive of dried monk poop, which would yield no end of data on diet, agriculture, climate, health, and racial and family lineage. You never know what people will want preserved.”

This is my dried monk poop.