on logbooks and diaries and documenting the everyday mundane

A journalist is, in a sense, a documentarian, a chronicler of life, and though I've called that profession my career for more than a decade, I've only diligently kept a logbook chronicling my own life for a few years now. It's honestly been one of the best additions to my day, and I'm bummed I didn't start sooner.

A logbook, as opposed to a diary, is a simple list of things I did that day, with a few drawings thrown in for fun. I don't get into detail and rarely, in fact, write more than a few words to describe that day's activities. The prose, such as it is, is sparse and utilitarian, meaning few things mundane make it in the logbook. 

After reading Kathryn Scanlan's "Aug. 9—Fog," a cut-up collection of a diary she found at an estate 15 years ago, I'm reconsidering that.

The 86-year-old woman who originally wrote these words barely completes sentences and thoughts, similar in a sense to my approach, but where we divulge makes all the difference. 

According to the publisher, Scanlan found the stranger’s five-year diary at an estate auction in a small town in Illinois. "The diary was falling apart—water-stained and illegible in places—but magnetic to Scanlan nonetheless. After reading and rereading the diary, studying and dissecting it, for the next 15 years she played with the sentences that caught her attention, cutting, editing, arranging, and rearranging them into the composition that became Aug 9—Fog (she chose the title from a note that was tucked into the diary)."