"Nothing Much Else Happened:" Presenting the Diary of A 12-Year-Old

This may be a huge mistake.

But what the heck, the new year is a time for experimenting, right?

About a month ago, while going through some old college files in a box, I discovered a small, beat-up book with the simple word "Diary" on the front. Oh, and a sticker on it that read "One Year." In case the user of the diary was unclear on the concept of the diary. It had a clasp with a lock on it, they key long lost, but thankfully the clasp unlocked. I recognized it immediately, of course: it was my own diary, my first diary, from 1978, when I was 12-going-on-13 years old.

I thumbed through, randomly reading entries, remembering how banal my life in Pacific Palisades was. But something about its ... how do you say ... authenticity struck me. The writing was almost completely without ornament; about the most emotional I would get is marking particularly enjoyable days with a star and the carefully scripted words "Highlight Day" above the day's date. This was a very straightforward document of a year in a circa-1970s 12-year-old's life. He had a girlfriend (at least for part of the year), but considering what a blathering romantic he grew up to be, any dramatic emotion for said girlfriend was notably absent, at least on the page. He played a lot of instruments, lived for amusement parks and baseball, and worshipped his older brothers.

And then I had a thought ... one of those thoughts that might have been better not having been thunk: What if I put this diary up on the blog? Day by day, throughout 2010, I would post the page of text I scribbled as I lay in my bed. (The diary's format was one page per day, thankfully limiting my ability to describe each day.)

I made mention of this idea at the end of a long post here in mid-November, and I got a couple of positive "do it!" comments over on Facebook. But since then, I've gone back and forth on thinking this was either a potentially valuable document of a 12-year-old's life, or a horrible idea that will make family and friends realize that I was as utterly dull in 1978 as I am in 2010.

But I've decided to give it a shot and see how it goes over. Some will read this, I'm sure, and think: Oh my god, he was that way even before he was a teenager? Most of you, I'm sure, will yawn.

But I'll give it a month or so and see how it goes. If nothing else, the Internet will have a thorough, day-by-day document of a southern California kid's life in the 1970s. And I'll be utterly humiliated. It's a win-win!

Here goes nothing. Literally.

***

To view the first day click: January 1, 1978

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