Here's a small-world story for you.

Back in the winter of 2002 I was hunkered down on a NATO base in an undisclosed location somewhere in Hungary.  Aside from the soldiers, who were, of course, delightful as soldiers generally are if you're not the enemy, it was a pretty miserable year.  First of all, for some reason my quarters were painted Pepto-Bismol pink.  The womblike claustrophobia of it all was taken to another level when my personal laptop crashed, leaving me more or less completely cut off from the outside world and curled up in the fetal position much of the time I was not teaching.

Not to mention how traumatic computer crashes can be anyway.  We've all been through it. We've all lost our Great American Novel or Kubla Khan.  Even the loss of your latest vacation photos, or a meticulously compiled and painstakingly categorized Lolcats collection can leave you in despair.  In the 2002 crash I lost lots of personal photos, drafts of several short stories, and a month of my diary.  It was like losing a month of my life.  And a computer crash like that can be so demoralizing it can throw youright into an abyss of despair, making it impossible to get back towork for weeks.

Your first impulse is to try somehow to reconstruct it, but the precise value of a diary* is its candid, spontaneous reflection of the day just ending.  To see yourself in a moment of candor is, for me, part of the existential value of keeping a diary. If you wait even a couple days to record it, it feels more canned than candid, and the delightful trivia of the moment becomes merely trivializing. 

Nowadays I'm extremely disciplined about making back-ups, but it's also easier, what with flashdrives with what back in the day would have been enormous capacities.  Today I can carry this...


...(and then some) on my keyfob. 

But before the big crash of 2002, I'd been chatting online with a guy from Roslindale (by way of Charlotte, North Carolina) named Randy.  He was in IT, and it so happened had some rehabbed laptops lying around, and sent me one when mine crashed out of the kindness of his heart.  Which is what got me through the rest of that winter.

We never met — he went off to parts unknown and I returned eventually to Budapest — until a couple of months ago one of the South End Knitters, whom I'd never met either, discovered that I was a fan.  She probably came upon my blog via Universal Hub or some other aggregator of local online content.  At any rate, she mentioned it in passing to Randy, her former neighbor and long-time friend, who recognized me from photos, and got in touch.

I immediately invited him to dinner to show my gratitude for his kindness in getting me through that bleak winter all those years ago.  We had a nice chat over sushi (served up by the adorable redhead with the slight speech impediment at Snappy), and decided that next time we should get together with the South End Knitter responsible for connecting the dots for us.  So this weekend we all had dinner at Orinoco, where the latest South End Knitter side-project was on display.  And down around the corner a ravishingly revamped Shepard Fairey original, too...


The weather was delightful, the food delicious, and the company incomparable. 

And not only that.  Now I've got the inside scoop on the Knitters' next big project.  Stay tuned!
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*I use the word "diary" knowing that it brings to mind, especially to those who don't keep one, a little pink book with a chintzy lock on it filled with teenage angst written in bubble script with hearts and smileys instead of dots for i's.  Something along these lines...

...when in fact my diary...

...is nothing like that.

Many's the time I've mentioned my diary only to be mocked with a "do you address each entry 'dear diary?'"  followed by a fantasy version of an entry, usually about a boy-crush, offered up in some kind of dreamy "internal monologue" voice.  Occasionally I get an Anne Frank crack.  Obviously if I felt I could in good conscience call it something other than a diary I would.

But somehow "journaling" doesn't do it for me — it sounds forced — like those people you see perched all around the site of Thoreau's cabin on Walden Pond, hunched over their comp books straining for a revelation.  Journals acknowledge some public purpose, whereas your garden-variety diary is usually just too evil to see the light of day until the diarists days are done. 

There are few things in my view as sacrosanct as a personal diary.  A guest in my boudoir last summer ventured onto my laptop while I was out of the room and found a diary entry carping about his faults — which I knew I had no right or reason to complain about to him.  I mean, if his squeaky voice and eerie resemblance to Tom Hanks in his Bosom Buddies days bothered me, it was my problem, not his — he couldn't do anything about it, but I could.  And after that little episode I did.  I had no sympathy for his hurt feelings. But I was grateful for the easy out. 

The thing is, if you read a diary as anything other than a record of the moment in which it was written, expressly without the benefit of hindsight, you entirely miss the point.  And if you think for a minute that people who keep them don't have the foresight to know that hindsight will more often than not contradict them, you're mistaken again. 

But it works both ways.  The faithful diarist knows that memory is fluid.  When I go back ten or fifteen years in my diary, I often find that my memory of what is recorded there is different — sometimes significantly — from what I myself faithfully recorded at the time.  Hindsight may be 20/20, but looking back you still can't see over the horizon line.  Nothing quite like a diary — a faithful record of the moment itself around the time of its passing — to teach you the limits of hindsight.