Spiral Notebook Sunday: Monday, September 5, 1983

"Stick with me kid and we'll go places." If Garfield had only known what he was getting himself into...

I've always loved this snippet from Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird¹: "I started writing sophomoric articles for the college paper. Luckily, I was a sophomore."

While digging around in Volume 1 of my journal to choose today's selection for Spiral Notebook Sunday, I had to remind myself several times that I was a sophomore (and a high school one at that) when I scribbled such immortal lines as "The president is on TV. He has just set Dr. Henry Kissinger up as 'special aid' in Central America. No one else seems to agree with that idea. What with as Ronald, dear, puts it--'the inaccurate stereotypes' about Kissinger. He is talking about Watergate. I am too young to remember--and have no idea what Kissinger had to do with it. (At this point I don't particularly care--I really wish RR would shut up and put A-Team on.)"

That little nugget is one of the more coherent paragraphs amid lots of song quotes, soap opera plot summaries, random shifts in subject and frequent tantrums about how the Army and/or my parents and/or my geometry/Spanish/French teachers and/or any and all of my siblings were ruining my life. I was reading awkward passages aloud earlier to Daughter-Only and commented that the style could really be called extreme stream of consciousness because there's so little filtering--it was clear I was writing whatever popped into my head at a given moment, often midway through a previous thought.

So that's the field from which I chose the following passage in which my mother lays down the law about the bickering among her four children.

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Monday, September 5, 1983

Family discussion time---one of the really lovely one-sided ones where Mom tells us all what's wrong with us and gives us a lot of "or elses." Well, this time it's get along or else no Guiding Light. Well, no TV or Atari anyway. Which means no Guiding Light, which means no Grant², which means we're going to get along. But for me the threat is the only reason--Guiding Light is the one thing the Army can't take away. They took everything else, though, and wrecked my entire life! And Mom isn't much help, lately..."You're not in Pennsylvania anymore." and "You're living six to eight months in the past." and so on. It was a really lovely conversation, believe me...Don't think I don't realize that I'm being bitter, childish, bratty, unreasonable and living in the past. Because I do--I mean I would have to be dense to not realize it with everyone telling me so.


1. There are many, many writing books that I consider valuable, but really only two that I consider essential: and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott is one of them. Anne Lamott has a knack for delving right into the heart and soul of things and the book is full of wisdom that is applicable not just to writing, but--as the title indicates--to life as well. The other essential writing book (that also has includes some sneaky life lessons) is Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg. I have owned multiple copies of both books because I have a tendency to give them away to anyone who shows the slightest interest in writing.

2. The actor who played Phillip Spaulding on Guiding Light and I were on a first name basis, obviously. Throughout this volume of the journal, he competes for space--handily holding his own--against various crushes from high school.