A Meta-textual Analysis Level of Navel-Gazing Headassery

1,237 journal entries since 7/1/19. There are scattered entries before, but 7/1/19 is the day I count as the start of my journal. It’s been 2,007 days since. 1,237 entries is 61.63% which means that I’ve journaled a bit more than half of the days since I set out to make this a habit.

***A disclaimer***
The data is offset by some days having more than one entry, but that’s just getting pedantic.

Of course, 1,237 only accounts for the entries Notes app. The second time I did The Artist’s Way, I filled up about 6 spiral notebooks with my Morning Pages. I have dozens of other entries in my Google Drive. And let’s not forget the live novelization of my life I began when I was 11 and continued until I was 15 (It was in this iteration of the journal that I came up with the name “Max Bennett Kelly).

I suppose after a decade and a half of writing about myself, it was about time I started a blog. When I first started journaling, I had this secret pipe dream that one day I would be world famous and someone would publish my journals, and people would read it for fun. That was when my entries looked like this:

It’s funny to look back on because not only were they impersonal, they were BORING. Of course I wasn’t afraid of that being posted. But also.. WHY did I think anyone would want to read that?

I suppose the question still stands – who would want to read this blog? I try not to ask myself questions like that anymore. Nowadays, when that kind of question pops up, I just let it go. If you go back in time in my journal, you’d find a lot of that, especially 2+ years ago. “Who would want to listen to my music?” “Who do I think I am to put my art into the world?” Alternatively, if those questions weren’t there, you could find them in the subtext. Let’s look at previous December 27th-ish entries to see what I was saying.

A bit of a long entry, actually. You can see that I got much better even between 7/1/19 and 12/28/24. I underlined some sentences that made it into the spoken word section of “Superinlove.” Can’t hear it? Listen to the bridge after the second chorus, going into the outro. There’s a bunch of yelling in the background. I’m saying “And when the plane took off, I saw everything. I saw the scope of it all. I’m me. It all comes back. I’m ME. Sometimes I forget. But I know who I am.”

I’ll include the isolated vocals:

Sometimes there’s a bit of kismet when I go back and look for the day’s journal entry on previous years. Usually there’s a parallel between what I write on any given day across the last five years of consistent entries. Today’s wasn’t super pertinent (mind you, I didn’t even have a 12/27 entry any other year). But I did have a 12/26 entry and THREE 12/28 entries, one of which I showed you, the other of which I included above. Now, I write my daily entry, and after finishing (or whenever I feel inclined) I find it useful to analyze my previous years’ entries and see if there’s a pattern I’m either continuing or breaking.

I’m not joking when I say that almost every time, I find a very suspiciously similar tidbit that crossed my mind, every year. Here’s an extremely private example I’ll give you in exchange for making it this far. On 12/21/24, I wrote an extremely elaborate journal entry, and mentioned How I Met Your Mother, because I’m rewatching it right now. It made me think of my first girlfriend, because we watched it together. I offhandedly mentioned her in my journal. When I was done writing, I searched 12/21 and found it to be one of the rare dates that I have an entry for every year since 2019. And what do you know? On 12/21 there’s a single offhanded remark about this girl for the last 5 years. Isn’t that bizarre? I tried to rack my brain about why, and I remembered. ON 12/21/12, that date 12 years ago, I lost my virginity to that girl (TMI, sorry, and not it’s not weird that I remember the exact date because it was the day the Mayan Calendar said the world would end, so we were like… fuck it, let’s do it). And it just so happens that on that day, 12/21/12, we must have been on our first HIMYM watch. And here I was, 12 years later, thinking about that same girl, watching the same show, on that same date. I like to think that I was on the same episode, too.

The only explanation is that our body or soul has some connection to a point in time, and that there’s some inherent MEANING to each date in the Gregorian calendar. But what IS a date? I suppose it’s a way to describe the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun. It repeats every year when the Earth and Sun are in the same position. And for some reason, the position of the planets for the last five years has made me think of the girl I loved when I was 15. Is there some astrological significance here? Does journaling make me believe in astrology? Sort of. Sort of not. But it makes me think that we are creatures caught in a loop that we have no hope of escaping without acknowledging our predicament first.

Journaling at first was useful as a way to keep track of what I was doing during the day. I was inspired to journal in earnest after reading Michael Crichton’s Travels. He says (paraphrased) that keeping a detailed log of what you do every day is the only way to certify that you are not going insane. Funny enough, back in the day, I used to fear I was going crazy. In fact, in my 12/27/21 entry, I’m freaking out about losing my mind (a common theme back then).

There was a lot more to this one but I’ll cut it here. I’m extremely proud of myself for not being as afraid of my brain these days.

Also I lied for dramatic effect. There was a 12/27/21 entry but it’s just my tarot reading.

I suppose what I can garner from this time of the year every year, I am extra interested or connected to spiritualism and mysticism and am in a state where my brain is pliable and open. I used to be afraid of it, in ’21, but now, I accept that my brain has to be a putty sort of mush to be open to the energy of the world.

And what better way to start the blog? I suppose since I’ve reached the meta-textual analysis level of navel gazing that my headassery has to go SOMEWHERE. Thanks for reading. Talk soon -mbk