R2E #48*: "When a Man is Tired of London..."

He should sit next to me. We'd have a plenty to talk about. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE

TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS AFTER THE START of my daily journal entries, my iron-man writing streak nearly came to an end. I plum forgot to write that night, and shut off the light. But sleep didn’t come easily for me, then or ever, so my mind eventually wandered onto my new habit. That was bound to happen more than a few times in the 15,000 sleepy/drunken/concupiscent nights since the unbroken line of writing began. 

But that first forgetting? I nearly lost the string before I started unraveling it! A life unexamined! Unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown! Six million words: poof!

Natalie Goldberg wrote about the addictive process of journal-keeping in Old Friend from Far Away, her amazing book about the practice, theory, and emotion of memoir.

“Writing regularly calms the mind, not because you write about nice things, but because your fears, anxieties, your troubled thoughts know they will have place and time to express themselves. Slowly in this way you will build…