I used to keep a journal, in my adolescence and young adulthood - near daily, through a good part of most of a 10 year stretch. Attempts to reread it have not gone far. I don't think it will serve as much of a boon to future archaeologists: not a lot of "the way we lived in 1992" practicalities or even current events of significance. A lot of thinky-broody teen/early-twenties angst. Arguably the songs of days could be seen as pretty much the replication of this format with the sole improving feature of brevity.
The point is I can in theory go back to the pages of the journal period and often get some slender thread of narrative on the happenstance of my life at those moments. The songs sometimes refresh a particularly memory for me but often my state of mind and the particulars of my day to day of a given date are no less opaque for having read my diurnal lyrical offering.
Which finds me wondering about what I was thinking about has I pulled up on a thousand songs in the second project. I can remember deciding to close the first project at 1,001 (as in "Arabian Nights") and it feeling like the end of something of a marathon. I still can't remember what was going on in my head when I initiated a second project with a 10,000 song goal, other than I know I was influenced by Dave Sim's writing about his early-in-the-run decision to make Cerebus a 300 issue comic. The first few years had gotten off to a rough start, I got into some deep holes of backlog as I lost the songwriting plot over and again while trying to wrap my head around parenting, backlogs deep enough to require months to unravel and casting the whole premise into deep doubt. At 1,000 I was at last establishing a core stability in the general practice again.
I was riffing off the Tao Teh Ching and in re-reading, feel a little surprised the "big" numbers (either 999 or 1,000) come with little fanfare...
And then just this moment I think about it I remember, oh right, the very long-term error in the numbering based on some misreading of my dreadful handwritten scrawl (before I started instituting regular milestones of doing the math to make sure I hadn't gotten the numbering off again). I guess I did make note of it after all. Had the novelty worn off by 2,000? Guess we'll know in 2 & 3/4 years, give or take.
Closing in on a third of the way through these days (in four or five months). Record of the long journey.
