Journals All the Way Down
An essay that ended up being more about 1D than anticipated!
Before I begin today’s essay, I want to return to my first ever post.
I felt very strongly when I created this newsletter that I could only justify spamming my friends’ inboxes if the content was fun to read - that my essays were allowed to be be rambly or crazy, but never like reading homework. I even posted a manifesto:
Vivid and Pressing Fancies is a newsletter which contains no news. It does, however, contain all of the letters, except W, who knows what she did. I have been looking for a way to distribute my writing in a world where social media feels increasingly exhausting and no longer mandatory, and after making sure I’d already tweeted this joke, I decided to give Substack a try.
Like the revelation that your coworker who’s been referring to his “partner” is actually straight, this newsletter will come when you least expect it. There will be no logic to when it arrives in your inbox, no schedule to which it is beholden. It is free (both in the “wild horse” sense and in the monetary sense).
As for its content, expect parody pieces, personal stories, both lists and listicles, wordplay that can only be described as “very droll,” fiction that can only be described as “truly gross,” general kvetching, writing from my past, and – hopefully – writing from my future (I’m waiting for my male psychic, Justin, to get back to me on that).
Last month, I blurbed my mom’s newsletter (which you should follow), but aside from that, this is the longest I have ever gone between posts!
I wish I could say that I am extremely busy with an exciting new job, but that is not the case (at least not yet).
No; I have three completed posts in my drafts folder, and I sort of hate all of them. They’re various combinations of bratty, underbaked, and didactic (imagine for a moment how bratty, underbaked, and didactic a post of mine would have to be to not meet the low, low standards I have for a post. You should be very scared!).
Anyway, I have sort of slipped into a “once a month or more” posting schedule, and while I will endeavor to keep up a high tempo, I want to hold to my original mission statement and only deliver content to you that meets my low, low standards, even if that means a lull. So if you haven’t heard from me for a bit, it’s because I’m doing quality control!
Thanks for still reading, by the way. I’m very grateful.
Diary of a Guilty Kid
As I’ve referenced before in this Substack, I have tried to journal many times in my life, in different formats, and have been unable to sustain any.
I had the idea four years back to start doing a “song journal,” a bare-bones way to mark the passage of time. I often have songs stuck in my head for days or weeks, and while I’m not a big “music guy,” I find that songs really have the power to transport me to a specific moment in time - especially when they are played continuously in a specific location. (And I know there is science backing this up.)
The best example of this is the song “Alive” by Pearl Jam, a very straight song that cemented itself into my brain in the gayest way imaginable: playing on loop as the audience filed into a play that my high school theater troupe took to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
My memory is shit, and I really mean that. I’ve forgotten nearly every detail of that experience - I have no memory of who I played in the show, I have no memory of what we did in Scotland… I even have no idea what the lyrics of the song are (I just kind of Rural Juror my way through the noises). But as soon as I hear the opening chords to this song, I remember the way the lights looked backstage at our little venue. Crazy!!
At any rate, my idea for this new type of journal was simple: I would write down the date, whatever song was stuck in my head, and its artist. That was it - it really was mostly an exercise in habit-creating.
I tried my best to be honest about what I was listening to, and non-judgmental of myself. If a song from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode “Once More With Feeling” was what was racing through my head that day, into the little booklet it would go. (And indeed, ‘twas writ, many times.)
The little booklets were also a motivating factor. I found them at Daiso and just really really wanted to buy them, so then I had to justify how I would use them. I also liked that they wouldn’t take up precious, precious night stand space.
Because I am me, I imagined future grandchildren finding these little journals, and maybe even one of them starting a Julie & Julia-type (or maybe The Years of the Years of Lyndon B. Johnson-type blog, should my progeny turn out terribly) in which they would listen to whatever song I was listening to 60 years beforehand, guess at my mental state, and rediscover old forgotten music. I wish I knew what songs my grandmothers had been obsessed with in 1956! (Mostly Mariah Carey, I assume.)
In the past when I attempted the traditional method of journaling, I’d sit down and write two full pages about a boy I had been on three dates with (and would barely remember a year later), and then feel awful that I had dedicated time to that, but not, say, the wedding of a close friend. It wasn’t that the boy was more important, but rather that I was using journaling more as a form of therapy and processing than as a log of what was happening in my life, and I didn’t have to write though events that brought me uncomplicated joy.
With the song journal format, I wasn’t logging life events, just the soundtrack to my days, and that eliminated that specific type of guilt. The format also was forgiving to my memory; if I forgot to pack the journal before a trip, or couldn’t remember what song was circling through my head, I could jot down something on my phone and then fill the journal in when I was done.
And shockingly: I kept it up! Until I didn’t.
The list on my phone doubled as a failsafe against a journal getting lost, and a way to remember what was cycling through my mind when I was out in the world before the brainrot of the wee hours set in. I was pretty diligent about updating the phone list, but soon, I was putting off the transcription process regularly, and catching up when I had a free moment.
Those stretches grew, and grew, until I decided to redeem myself with a paperpalooza in which I would fully catch up… then I got a bad hand cramp that halted my work (if only iPhone typing muscles were the same as writing muscles).
I realized that it was unlikely I would ever catch up, and that even if I did, I would probably fall back into the iPhone logging habit again. And an iPhone list of songs was still a form of the journal… but a tiny handwritten ledger is suchhhh a different vibe from an iPhone note of hastily written song titles.
And so I decided to stop, though I still have the iPhone note with about seventy un-transcribed songs, and several empty journals. There is nothing stopping me from filling them but me, which - spoiler alert - makes me feel guilty.
I’ve been on a big One Direction kick lately, and I was thinking about how - were I still doing my song journals - this week of my life would be clearly defined, because it is a lot of me shaking my head in my car, marveling at the majesty of the four-song-run that is “Fools Gold” into “Night Changes” into “No Control” into “Fireproof.” (In the age before AI, thank god, so there’s no fear of robots making me feel things. Just perfectly-executed capitalism.)
Of course, the reminder that I used to keep the song journals brought a pang of guilt - “I really should have kept that journal up” - but I am 32 now and trying to be better. I took a step away from myself and tried to reframe it.
Here’s what I came up with: the process of doing those song journals made myself see my life differently, and that in itself is nifty. Instead of simply “listening to the pop masterpiece that is the song ‘C’mon C’mon,’” I had successfully trained my brain to mark the passage of time by music.
“Ah yes,” I could imagine myself as an old man reflecting: “the 2026 1D renaissance in which I learned to appreciate ‘Never Enough.’ What a lovely chapter of my young adulthood.”
Intrinsically, when you start anything - a blog, a career, a hobby, a relationship, whatever - you have marked the passage of time, whether you like it or not. There was your life before that choice, and after it, no matter if you drop it quickly or sustain it for the next twenty years.
In the bafflingly nostalgic and hauntingly beautiful ballad that is the song “Night Changes” (which should be talked about the way we talk about “Landslide,” fight me), the boys sing: “Having no regrets is all that she really wants.”
In my 30s, I’m endeavoring to do more and regret less. Feeling guilty about not continuing something is reasonable, but that negative feeling only exists because you started something, once. Did I fail at journaling, or did I create a journal where there was no journal before? Did I fail at journaling, or did I successfully catalogue two years of my life through song?
I tend to see things through puke-colored glasses. I even started this essay with the assertion that I’ve tried and failed to journal many times. And I maintain that as a fact, to an extent. But also, here I am, writing the 63rd post of a newsletter which is, in many ways, a log of my life.
Thanks for reading it. If you meet my grandchildren, please direct them to this substack (if the internet still exists), and tell them I tried my absolute best to journal for them.
And that they should really listen to the song “Collide” by Howie Day. It is a banger in 2026 and will still bang in 2090.
Usually willing to take the chain from off the door,
Johnny
So the good news is you won't need to worry about your progeny starting a 'Year of the Years of LBJ' type project because no one is ever going to love you enough to progenate with you.
HAGS,
Alex