The Diary Game – August 6, 2020

Hoquiam, Wash., seen from about midway up Beacon Hill.

Dear Diary:

Today was a good day in Grays Harbor; plenty of sunshine, with just a nip of a breeze to keep it cool.

I woke up in a good mood, as I recorded in my journal, your close cousin, which I’ve kept religiously since the early ’90s. Oh the tales of woe and self-pity in those pages! I’m glad you and I have kept things in a more positive vein.

My good mood had me feeling energized and ready to get to work on the blog. I mapped the day’s labor in my head: first a freewrite, then some work on a poem, for which I recently found a complementary photo. And then finally some work on a new fiction piece.

That’s not quite the way it went. Over breakfast, my reverie was punctured by a dustup in the street outside my apartment window. A guy and a lady from the apartments next door got into an argument, and the guy ended up in the street brandishing a knife. My downstairs neighbor diffused the situation with a curtain rod – I mean he got the guy to drop the knife – good thing: the cops arrived and arrested the guy; it might have been much more serious if he had still had the knife in hand.

I didn’t actually see any of this. It’s somewhat normal for arguments to spill into the street in this neighborhood; as a rule I don’t even look out the window when it happens. It did sound like a more serious than normal altercation, but, as I said, I was in the middle of breakfast. I didn’t pull the curtain back until I saw, through the thin fabric, the Hoquiam PD SUV parked just below, and heard the lady cop hollering, “Show me your hands!”

By that time the excitement was basically over. They cuffed the guy – who is a very nice man, when he isn’t in an altered state of consciousness thanks to meth or something of the sort – and hauled him away. I got the full story soon after, as the cops were interviewing the witnesses.

All of that sent my mood in a somewhat different direction. But I really wanted to write, so I eventually got settled down and worked on a five-minute freewrite. That actually took a couple of hours to write, because I extended the piece beyond what I could write in the first five minutes. After that I was starving, and my energy levels were next to nil, so I ate and napped and never really got productive again.

Except for checking in with you, dear friend; I’ll never forget to keep my diary up to date!