I'm an Amateur

I read the NY Times obituary the other day for this guy, Robert W. Shields, who may have been the most prolific diarist who ever lived. Apparently, he spent like four hours a day recording the minutia of his life in five-minute increments, retiring to his study in his underpants dozens of times a day to record everything he did, from pondering God to going to the bathroom. In the end, he churned out approximately 37 million words over the course of some twenty years, making him perhaps the most verbose diarist in history.

For me to get there on 327 words a day would take me about 113,000 days or about 300 years; chances are, I’m not going to make it.

The Times said that “What seems certain is that Mr. Shields believed that nothing truly happened to him unless he wrote it down.” While I’m not quite that obsessed, I do appreciate the sentiment. There is something about recording your days that makes them more tangible; and definitely, as my memory gets more selective with age, it’s nice to be able to look back on what I wrote on a given day as a way of assuring myself that it really happened.

So today, for instance, I’m sitting in the lobby of the Rex Hotel in San Francisco, waiting to meet Richard Leider so we can go to our “author day” at Berrett-Koehler, our publisher. A year from now, I likely won’t recall the strange faux-British décor with lots of bad paintings of dour-looking English women. But, I can refer back to this entry on the blog and remember how my stomach was grumbling a bit in anticipation of a stressful day and because all I’ve put in it so far today is a triple espresso.

That’s minutia, of interest to no one but me, but at least, unlike Shields, I’m not reporting on my bowel movements; again, as a diarist, I’m an amateur.