I was trying to organize all of my writing pieces together last night when I realized I lost a journal. Seven months of my life gone from May 98 to November 98. I told myself that it doesn't really matter because it's not like I ever reread my journals anyway but still, seven months of my life erased, disappeared just like that.

I've been keeping journals since junior high. My english teachers in junior high and high school made me keep one every school year. I made the mistake of throwing these journals out and I've regretted that decision ever since. God, it would have been so interesting to read about what I was thinking back then, what I was obsessing about, what scared me, what made me happy and what my life was like. Those journals were a record of each of those years. When I search through my own memories for what happened in those six years, I draw a fuzzy blank. I feel like Keanu Reeves in that movie about using the brain for storage. Somewhere along the line, I must have dumped a chunk of memory. Either that or all those of memories are misfiled and basically irretrievable.

I'm hoping that my seven month journal will turn up in my place one day. That somehow I stored where it wasn't supposed to be stored and I will somewhere in the future be able to read what my life was like from May to November 98.

I wonder if it will be depressing like that Samuel Beckett play, "Krapp's Last Tape". I saw this play in Berkeley last year. A man made recordings of his voice instead of journals. In the play, the man now about 80, totally decrepit, somewhat senile, with all those signs of aging that scare me. Loose wrinkled skin, slow agonizing movements, mouth that never quite close with a little saliva always dripping out and those old people's eyes that are semi clouded over from cataracts waiting to burst forth. Old people seem to also be covered with a layer of film made of grime, memories and sins from the past and the stench of death. The old man listens to a tape of himself at a much younger age when he was probably 40. The old man shows no emotion really, just the weariness of death. But the younger man's voice is alread full of regret as he goes over a lost love, lost opportunities, lost chances. Is that when death and old age start, when you start to regret your life so that by the time you reach a really old age, the regret wraps itself around you, becomes part of your being and becomes incorporated into your dying process to where you have to surround yourself with it by listening to old tapes of yourself. Talk about being in a hell of your own making. But it's Beckett, so maybe it's not that hellish after all because after all, you have the tapes to prove you at least did have a love, did have opportunities, did have chances. Was it John Donne who said in Paradise Lost, "Tis better to have loved once than to have never loved at all". Perhaps that is Beckett's small ray of hope for this man, he at least lived a life and has the tapes to prove it, listen to it, relive it over and over again.