The Perfect Journal

I once had The Perfect Journal. It was small, almost square, and leather bound with a stamp of a lion on the front. Chase got it for me when he spent a semester in Cambridge, England. I wrote every song in it. Within a few years, it was half full of scribbles, drawings, lyrics, lucid dreams, stories, and random spades scores.

By the time I lost it, it was totally full.

It was after a breakup. My head wasn’t on right. I was waiting tables and bar tending, trying to decide how to stay in grad school on a shoestring, and taking Paxil to keep the scaries away. The Perfect Journal stayed in my bag. Or so I thought.

In my schismatized memories, it was there, ready at any moment to be a comforting word or a margin to scribble some sappy idea. Instead, every time I actually checked, it wasn’t there. I was in denial and assumed it was at my apartment or in the car I was borrowing. Surely I had grabbed it when I got the essentials from my ex’s: guitars, books, Rubik’s cube, The Perfect Journal

I searched through my bag hundreds of times, convinced for years the journal would eventually turn up. That it had wandered off somewhere in my closet, peeking its little pages out, taunting me, yelling “hey moron, you forgot to look here!” Maybe someone would call me and tell me they found my sad words laying in a ditch next to the coffee shop, left there by a hobo who had more self respect than to continue reading my incessant self searching and dreaming.

But they were gone.

When I moved in with Rachelle in 2022, I finally went through the rest of the grieving process. I moved every book from my apartment, went through every box, and even searched my bag a few more times just to be doubly sure for the seven thousandth time.

It isn’t surprising that I am gifted journals. My band name is Dream Jurnal. I tried to make them as special and important to me as The Perfect Journal. But they haven’t stuck to me the way it did. It’s just easier to type it into Notes now, without the risk of escaping into the void of Lost and Notfoundland.

Improvised scratches and scribbly marks filled The Perfect Journal. Stuff I wrote but thought better of. Black and blue lines bringing a reign of destruction upon unworthy words. A reminder that mistakes can be changed into something that makes more sense, something that I can sing, something that moves me.

Something beautiful.

The breakthroughs in my world view always boil down to this purpose: Life is Letting Go. If I spend my life wishing The Perfect Journal would find its way back to me, I am using my time as wisely as an amputee waiting for his lost arm to grow back. Letting go is truth.

I imagine where it is now. On some strangers bookshelf taken down at parties to share the bizarre dreams and drawings. Or my lyrics and poetry are bringing someone hope as read alone in an Applebee’s booth. Maybe it’s at an antique store in Utah in some roll-top desk rubbing leather with a first edition Book of Mormon.

Most likely, though, it is buried beneath almost ten years of garbage at the landfill. The cover disintegrated and the pages, one by one, soil and sludge soaked. The words crumbling alone into the void from whence they came.

I only took six pictures of the pages in this journal. In the first one, it is next to a half full ashtray and an empty pint glass, because in 2013 I thought it was cool, hipsterish, and romantic to smoke indoors, which has assuredly become less cool as I have aged. I can make out only a few words on that page. But there’s a poem on the other five pages that I kind of like. Maybe because it’s all I have left. It was about a girl I loved, how different we were, and how our meeting and subsequent relationship was like wild animals colliding on bicycles. Which sounds hilarious and terrifying. You know…Love.

Ah yes. Raw, unedited, bad writing. The rest of it, maybe a hundred and seventy-two songs, poems, stories, and drawings, is just gone. The thought horrifies me even today. In a moment, an enormous part of your heart and soul can disappear without a warning.

Loss is Pain. Pain is loss. Life is Letting Go.

Songs aren’t meant to be caged up. They are meant to be created. After that, they are something else. Then it’s time for new things. More songs. More journals. More dreams. Learn who I am by filling the empty pages with ink. The Perfect Journal is gone, but what it taught me, still teaches me, lingers. It’s not the product. It’s not the pages. It’s not the music or the lyrics. It is the Creation. And It is good. Even when it’s gone.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a letter to an elementary class. He told them to write a poem, rip it up, and throw it in different trash cans. “You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.”

Fill up a journal and lose it.