This Sure Feels Weird

Monday September 15th, 2008 - Chicago, IL

Old habits die hard. I’ve been doing a daily diary for so long now that it has grown to be a regular part of my day like bathing or eating or looking at sports scores. It’s so ingrained in me that to stop doing it feels strange. It makes my day feel incomplete so I’ll keep it up even if it’s just for me. The discipline of doing it this long has become a habit. Why stop?

I’ve been keeping a diary in one form or another since I was a kid. I remember having a blank calendar book my grandfather gave me when he worked as a dispatcher of garbage trucks and snow plows for the city of Milwaukee. It was from the previous year but I was a kid and it didn’t matter to me. All I saw were a lot of blank pages that needed filling in.

I wrote about the first Brewers game I went to and about the wrestling matches I saw on TV and the baseball cards I traded with the kids in the neighborhood. Then as I got older I wrote about my grandparents’ constant fighting and not wanting to go live with my father and all his biker idiots and how things were falling apart at an early age. I kept track of it.

I didn’t write every day and like with exercise programs there were times when I fell off the wagon and stayed off for a while but I always kept coming back to it for some reason. I read somewhere that ‘a life worth living is a life worth recording’ or something like that.

I remember going through the darkest time of my life when I was being accused of bank robbery and it looked like I was going to prison for a few years. I kept an audio diary then and talked into a tape recorder every night for a few minutes and sometimes longer. I let it all go and unleashed my true feelings and again something about that felt worth my time.

I think I still have a bunch of those tapes somewhere even though I’ve never listened to even one of them. Every time I look at them I think about throwing them out but then I do what every radio person I know does - close the box back up and put it away again. I have no good reason why but I’m not alone. All my friends in radio have all their old tapes too.

That’s one thing I did manage to let loose. I kept mine for a long time but then I thought about it and saw how stupid that actually was. It would be like keeping high school work thinking there will be a use for it later other than keeping garbage people in business. No.

The main thing I kept a diary for throughout the years was to let my feelings out. I had a pretty isolated life as a kid and other than my grandfather there weren’t very many people I had a close enough relationship with to share those inner thoughts. I felt it was a healthy way to vent and I still do. It’s kind of like working out daily with a mental punching bag.

Today was another typical Monday as they have been for the last year or so. I went into the city to do Jerry’s Kidders on WLS and then stayed to visit the Museum of Science and Industry because it’s free all weekdays in September. I was just there a few weeks ago but I love that place and it was well worth going again. I saw stuff I didn’t see last time and it cheered me up a lot. Anything that stimulates my mind makes me feel like I belong there.