I’m in the process of writing my trip report. It seems to be taking forever. But it hasn’t really been forever – I’ve been back less than a month. I’m still in Sevilla. I sit and write and check my notes and think about the events and where they fell into place, in my mind vs. in my journal.

You have got to write this stuff down. At least I do. There are blind spots in my brain. Whole days could go by that would be unremembered if I didn’t make a note here or there about what was going on. For example:

On September 30, 1998, in Florence, I wrote in my journal that the Arno was very brown, that I could have had a bartender named Lorenzo but chose not to, and that I was smoking cigarettes and it felt really good.

What I remember: my friend Lisa was hanging with some guy named Carmello. He took us to a bar, full of guys, who looked at us with suspicion. Lorenzo, the bartender, was aloof, until he asked me what I thought of Carmello, and I said, “stronzo.”

I didn’t know much Italian, but I knew that word. I didn’t really think Carmello was a stronzo. I think I was just trying to impress Lorenzo with my usage of Italian swear words. “Why don’t you stay?” he asked, when we were leaving.

I’m not sure I would even have this memory at all, had I not written a short paragraph about it in one of my scraggly notebooks. It’s not even that great of a memory. But it is A MEMORY.

If I didn’t have these journals, I could never write a trip report. I’m about to post a trip report from a journey I took four years ago, and I can because I wrote down everything on that trip.

Sometimes the writing is really lame:

“Everyone has an umbrella here. It rains alot.” (Man, that is FANTASTIC. George W. could do better.)

Sometimes it is better:

“The boy from the glass shop comes into the cafe and he and the barman have a quick drink and hum to each other.” (Did this really happen, or is this my perception of what happened? Hmmm.)

Sometimes it takes a while before you can read your journal and think, hey, that is pretty good.

It’s important to me that it be good – but it is more important to me that I’ve recorded it.

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