everything was exact.

Last night during the 3HP show we did a structure we call "Diary River," where we got a date from the audience and we all read from our 2003-2004 journals (the year we all met.) It's golden. Every time.

And although I'm surprised and even shocked by some of the content, I'm not really embarrassed to share it because A) it's funny stuff, and B) it doesn't matter. It comes down to what Eggers refers to in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius when he writes:
What am I giving you? I am giving you nothing. I am giving you things that God knows, everyone knows...
These things, details, stories or whatever are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs
for anyone to see.

But I feel like the same logic can be applied to keeping these journals in the first place:
So should the snake bring it with him, this skin should he tuck it under his arm? Should he? No, of
course not. He's got no f*cking arms!

I have this large, heavy box of notebooks, dating back to 1993. Literal baggage. But like Eggers' snake, I've shed these skins. So why carry them?
Well, that's easy. Fodder for comedy shows. Because is there anything so endearing as the following?

"A poem:
Shannon is not wicked drunk.
But she is hiccoughing [sic]." 11/16/08

When I read that I remembered the night it referred to, and also recalled a book of two line poems* I had completely forgotten about. Thanks, comedy!
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*Nice Hat. Thanks., by Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer whose signatures appear on the same page in my journal as this Shannon poem because I went to hear them read at a book shop in the Valley. And they improvised a poem based on my suggestion. Which I had also forgotten all about