Do you keep a diary?

[pantodragon]

Do you keep a diary? Do you still have the diaries you wrote when you were younger? Is their content highly personal? Would you feel embarrassed, mortified, humiliated if your diaries were made public after your death? If the answer to those questions is Yes, then here’s some advice: do not keep your diaries, throw them away --- NOW!!! --- before you forget, before you get run over by a bus or have some other fatal accident, before your surviving relatives find them or the house-clearance man turns up to empty your house.

But whatever you do, don’t throw the diaries whole into the rubbish bin. Burn them, shred them, tear ‘em up! That’s the only way they will remain private. If you don’t burn or shred or tear, you are in mortal danger of the most intimate details of your life being published, being made available for all eyes to pore over and scrutinize for every last shameful, scandalous detail.

And don’t think that writing your diaries in code is going to prevent your private life from being paraded in public. Oh, no! Because this man, this Diary Man, who has made it his life’s work to collect and make public your diaries and the diaries of other “ordinary” people will go to great lengths to crack your code --- just as he has done with at least one diary that came into his possession.

This fact invites an obvious question: Why would someone go to the trouble of writing their diary in code? Could it be that they don’t want other people to be able to read the contents? Could it be that they want the details of their life to remain private? This is not a question that appears to concern our Diary Man. He is very proud of his skill at cracking codes, more especially, it would seem, when the code revealed that one diary’s owner, a woman who subsequently became a school inspector, spent the afternoons of her earlier life receiving “gentlemen visitors” at her home i.e. she was a prostitute, and her clients probably US servicemen. But that’s the nub of the matter, isn’t it? Why pick on that woman’s diary as an example? Why pick on the smutty, salacious details of her life? Why not pick on run-of-the-mill diary entries? Simple. Where there’s muck there’s brass.

This Diary Man, as I call him, was presented on the radio programme today as being a Hero, a saver of lives; a “saver of the stories of ordinary people’s lives”, was how it was put. Hero? Hero my a**e!!!

Much of the second half of the programme was spent talking to people whose eyes were lighting up at the thought of the money that could be made from being involved in this diary publishing process. You could hear their mental tills ringing up the day’s takings and their mental calculators working out the killing to be made from “saving” these diaries, from “saving” the stories of ordinary people’s lives.

And don’t think either that writing a memo in your diaries to the effect that you don’t want them published will stop this man from “saving” them. If you want to keep your diaries and pass them on to your children/grandchildren (for family consumption only), then you’d better see a good lawyer. Get a lawyer to draw up a document prohibiting their publication. If you don’t, the Diary Man will go to the law to get a diary published.

And don’t make the fatal mistake of trusting your nearest and dearest not to do the dirty on you when you’re dead. Composer Richard Strauss left some music in the hands of his widow (or maybe it was his daughter) when he died; music that he wrote when younger but didn’t want published (he declared himself to be ashamed to have had such inferior work made public), yet he was barely cold in his grave before his wife had the music published (and no doubt made herself a pretty penny or two in the process).

And what second or third rate art gallery --- and I can think of one near me --- with limited funds, doesn’t have a fourth rate painting by a better known artist on its walls; a painting that was consigned to the dustbin because the artist knew it was poor quality, would have been humiliated to have on public display, yet was “saved” by some latter day dustbin raider so that they could make a few pennies from a dead man’s discarded rubbish.

Strauss, of course, was famous before he died. The Diary Man, however, is not interested in “famous”, but in “ordinary”. But whether the victims are famous or not, the living, including this Diary Man, simply have no shame, no respect for either themselves or the dead, when the lure of making brass from the muck of dead people’s lives rears its ugly head.

I disposed of my old diaries a long time ago. Have YOU burned your diaries yet?

[kannin]

ill never burn my diaries, for the fact that i poured so much raw emotion into them, emotions i will never have again, im keeping them to remember the hurtles ive had to jump

[Kowalski]

I used to keep a diary, but there's really no personal information in them....Just poetry and short stories, or ideas for stories....

Nothing personal or interesting for that matter.

[kannin]

I used to keep a diary, but there's really no personal information in them....Just poetry and short stories, or ideas for stories....

Nothing personal or interesting for that matter.

nice! do you ever go back and read them sometimes on a rainy day?

[sarah_444]

I still have a few journals in back from my high school years and reread them once every few years when I come across them. No shameful or scandalous details, but I'm so glad that I grew up (somewhat) .

Maybe one day I'll decide to get rid of them but for now I'm keeping them around.

Edited July 11, 2013 by sarah_444

[Kowalski]

nice! do you ever go back and read them sometimes on a rainy day?

Sometimes, if I'm bored, or I'm lacking creative story ideas.....

[kannin]

I still have a few journals in back from my high school years and reread them once every few years when I come across them. No shameful or scandalous details, but I'm so glad that I grew up (somewhat) .

Maybe one day I'll decide to get rid of them but for now I'm keeping them around.

indeed

[kannin]

Sometimes, if I'm bored, or I'm lacking creative story ideas.....

thats good almost like a realistic butterfly effect

[kannin]

my diaries help me remind my self what ive had to do to become the man and father i am now, i respect my old self

[Odd Requiem]

It's a journal! Not a diary.

But I've kept almost all of them. It's sometimes vindicating to see how far I've come in life.

Plus, I have sketches and pictures and memories that I'm not ready to forget.

Aren't diaries/journals really just words we want to say but don't have the voice to say it?

If my journals were to be published 100 years after my death, I wouldn't be rolling in my grave.

It would almost be like making your life infinite.

I don't know.

[Ashotep]

I've got one and I write in it once in a while. Some of the things that I write about are usually about the crap I have been through. Its a place to sound off and not hurt anyone's feelings unless they read it. Which if I do say something that someone would find hurtful its because they did or said something to hurt me.

Yes Odd Requiem there is some stuff in there that I would like to say to someone but don't feel like I can.

[kannin]

I've got one and I write in it once in a while. Some of the things that I write about are usually about the crap I have been through. Its a place to sound off and not hurt anyone's feelings unless they read it. Which if I do say something that someone would find hurtful its because they did or said something to hurt me.

Yes Odd Requiem there is some stuff in there that I would like to say to someone but don't feel like I can.

ours are vary similiar

[ReaperS_ParadoX]

I have a couple of notebooks of drawings and me writing about the strange nightmares iv had, various ideas and such. If someone read those they would probably think man this guy was a Genuis, I also have some things in there that people would think disturbing. Eh I cant really get embarrassed after I die so I don't see the point in Burning any of it.

[Grandpa Greenman]

I am suppose to, but it ends up a book of drawings.

[kannin]

I am suppose to, but it ends up a book of drawings.

still a diary, drawing is expression and emotion, diary is a diary just as long as you pour your emotions into it some way shape or form

[LostSouls7]

I mostly just document important and good things..

However If I copyright and leave the copyrights to my family..

there is no way this Diary Man could ever publish the diaries

signed by my or my pen name...

I was thinking of writing a biography of myself..

but it might end up being a bit boring...

I however could write many books on hauntings

and evil demons from stories my relatives have passed down

[kannin]

i keep a diary and a voice log

[Still Waters]

I used to always keep a diary and would fill it in every night without fail. Just about my day really, what I did etc., nothing too exciting for anyone else to read. That all changed on the day we had two sudden deaths in the family, I didn't have the heart to write in my diary that night and have never kept one since.

[kannin]

I used to always keep a diary and would fill it in every night without fail. Just about my day really, what I did etc., nothing too exciting for anyone else to read. That all changed on the day we had two sudden deaths in the family, I didn't have the heart to write in my diary that night and have never kept one since.

sorry to hear that stills i know how you feel, but hey you still kick a$$

[Still Waters]

sorry to hear that stills i know how you feel, but hey you still kick a$$

Aww thank you It was a long time ago now.

[kannin]

Aww thank you It was a long time ago now.

no one is truly dead, as long as the memories survive than that soul is immortal in the minds of their loved ones

[pantodragon]

Some of you have said that you do not mind what happens to your diaries after you are dead. Unless it's no more than a ship's log book, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear......

You are highlighting another of this modern world's sicknesses. I have talked of the increasing number of schoolchildren who are diagnosed as having "no sense of danger". What you also see in classrooms, increasingly, is children sharing snotty handkerchiefs, earphones (the kind that plug INTO the ear), water bottles, in fact, anything without regard to whoever or whatever had it first.....in other words, a complete loss of any sense of hygiene. (Princess Di holding the hands of the diseased or dying set a bad example here --- but note also that Princess Anne has not degenerated so far as to fail to realise the need to wear gloves when shaking the hands of all and sundry). So after losing danger and hygiene, the next on the list to go is privacy. We are being made to feel ashamed if we baulk at any opportunity to reveal our all, whatever that "all" may be, aged, diseased or deformed, and to feel ashamed if we should like to have locks on our bathroom doors etc. This loss of a sense of privacy is highly damaging and is wehat is being revealed by those who care not whomsoever reads their private writings.

[Rlyeh]

Maybe I'm the odd one out but I've never kept a diary, nor do I see the point of it.

[pantodragon]

Maybe I'm the odd one out but I've never kept a diary, nor do I see the point of it.

When I saw that you had posted a comment, I was expecting it to be in your usual abusive mode. Should I be offering sympathy or commiseration? Are you ill, off colour, or maybe a pet has died?!!

[ReaperS_ParadoX]

Some of you have said that you do not mind what happens to your diaries after you are dead. Unless it's no more than a ship's log book, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear......

You are highlighting another of this modern world's sicknesses. I have talked of the increasing number of schoolchildren who are diagnosed as having "no sense of danger". What you also see in classrooms, increasingly, is children sharing snotty handkerchiefs, earphones (the kind that plug INTO the ear), water bottles, in fact, anything without regard to whoever or whatever had it first.....in other words, a complete loss of any sense of hygiene. (Princess Di holding the hands of the diseased or dying set a bad example here --- but note also that Princess Anne has not degenerated so far as to fail to realise the need to wear gloves when shaking the hands of all and sundry). So after losing danger and hygiene, the next on the list to go is privacy. We are being made to feel ashamed if we baulk at any opportunity to reveal our all, whatever that "all" may be, aged, diseased or deformed, and to feel ashamed if we should like to have locks on our bathroom doors etc. This loss of a sense of privacy is highly damaging and is wehat is being revealed by those who care not whomsoever reads their private writings.

So what are you saying, I don't share to the point of getting other peoples germs or any of that, I lock the door when I go to the bathroom. I'm a very private person, I don't have Facebook or MySpace, I'm generally a reclusive person, I have a very small circle of friends. If someone took my writings after I was DEAD there would be nothing I could do about it. The fact that I wont get embarrassed by them reading my writings its mute, because for one I would be DEAD, and Two I highly doubt ANYONE would benefit off of it.