I have kept a journal since I was 19. A “journal” is like a diary, except entries are not made daily (though they can be) and it is not meant to be a record of anything: such as, “met Ryan for coffee,” or “saw Jennifer Aniston at the Farmer’s Market.” I use my journaling (the act of keeping a journal) to work things out: like if I have a particularly difficult interaction with someone, I will write about it in my journal to understand where it went wrong, how I feel about that, and how I might do a better job of avoiding conflict (with this person and people in general) in the future.
I say I started at 19, but a recent discovery by my brother-in-law reveals that I was working things out and expressing my feelings much earlier than that – at 7 years old!
My sister and I lost both our parents in the last four years – my mother in 2021 and my father in 2023 – and in the time since, we have “discovered” many things in the house they lived in for over fifty years. Things like a love letter from my dad to my mom, written in the early 1950’s when they were courting, in which my dad professes that his love for my mom is so deep that he is “considering bathing more than once a week.”
Before they were married, my father lived in a boarding house in LA, where I imagine there was a single, common bathroom at the end of a hallway with multiple, private, rented rooms. So I interpret his romantic entreaty not as one of hygiene but of practicality, one he considered but never acted on: the entire time I was growing up, he never bathed more than once a week – on Sundays, in the afternoon, in the bathtub! But she married him anyway! Before she passed away, their marriage had lasted a remarkable 66 years of Sunday baths.
They kept everything. In all honesty, it was probably her. And when I say everything, I mean everything! I was run over by a car when I was 8. My friend Tory, who had been eating a sandwich next to me, was killed instantly. I suffered a crushed shoulder and cuts all over my body from being dragged about 25 feet until the car, which was driverless, struck a fire hydrant which stopped it. After my mom died 47 years later, when cleaning out a cupboard in the back hallway of our house, my sister found the clothes I was wearing that day, including the shoes, tucked away behind blankets and sheets. That is kind of macabre; though I imagine the trauma of almost losing your 8 year old son to a random accident stays with you.
But it was my brother-in-law’s find after my father died that confirmed I started “writing” at a young age. I call it the “Stuffing Letter.” Now, I’ll need to clarify a few things.
First, I had a reputation for writing emails throughout my career. I’ve never liked conflict, not even competitiveness. So my default in the face of a disagreement was to retreat and send a strongly worded (usually profanity-laden) email later that day. They were usually long, detailed, dripping with sarcasm, and threatening – they could be summarized, though, in three words: “oh yah?… well…” Didn’t matter if you were a subordinate or a superior: piss me off, you’re getting flamed. One time, the head of technical support in Europe for my company, Technicolor, was nowhere to be found during an outage affecting the printing of payroll checks at our facility in Rome (which was part of my portfolio). Employees not getting paychecks on payday is a Defcon 1 crisis in my book, but I could not get ahold of George, the tech support head based out of Perivale in England, to troubleshoot and resolve it. George was frequently AWOL, and an all-around ass.
So that night, armed with a pack of cigarettes and a glass of wine (who are we kidding?… it was a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of wine), I fired off an email to George’s boss, the Vice President of IT for our parent company in France, Thomson, a man I’d never met, and laid waste to every aspect of George’s professional life in great detail and with colorful language, calling him lazy, incompetent, and unreliable. George was fired, and word spread, rightly or wrongly, that it was a direct result of my email. Now, in my defense, the exact phrase I used when referring to George was “your boy George” as in “whenever I need him, I can never get your boy George on the phone.” But the story spread, as these stories do, that I’d referred to him as “Boy George,” the questionably dressed and mascara-ed 80’s pop singer of the band Culture Club.
And from that day forward, anyone on the receiving end of one of my emails was said to have been “Boy Georged.” I even overheard two employees talking in the cafeteria one day. One said, “did you hear about Chris? He’s pissed off Matt again.” To which the other replied, “he better be careful or he’s gonna get himself Boy Georged.”
And second, you need to know that for the first 19 years of my life I was referred to by my middle name – Brad (it’s actually Bradford). Armed with that knowledge, you will understand the signature on the Stuffing Letter.
Now we know, because my mother annotated and dated it, the Stuffing Letter was written on December 17, 1973, and we can infer, because of its contents, that (1) my mother had served something called “Stuffing Plus” for dinner, and (2) I was not pleased. Looking at it today, the spelling and punctuation are appalling, but I Boy Georged the stuffing. Here it is:
What is remarkable, even to me, is that I took the liberty of suggesting how my father might react to my missive. Even back then, I realized you need to corroborate and show support for your basic thesis – and nothing does this better than a quote from a third party. The body of the Stuffing Letter appears to have been written in black sharpie. You’ll note that at the bottom left of the page, in blue, ball point pen, I have included my dad’s reaction to the point I am making with the words “I think he is right dear.” Apparently, I wasn’t too fussed that he didn’t actually say that! But I had the presence of mind to write his fake thoughts in a different kind of ink, so as to differentiate them from my own, showing either a high level of intelligence or a dangerous deviousness.
Nevertheless, the Stuffing Letter is evidence that I’ve been putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, for years, for at least 52 years. And I still Boy George when I get frustrated by something or annoyed by someone. Just ask the director of my assisted living facility! But for the most part I try to channel that impulse, creativity, and passion into this blog, and put my inevitable annoyances in my journal.