memories | M Thomas Apple Author Page

Dear Diary – June 26, 2005

January 4, 2024
MThomas

Last night I had a strange dream…

I was home, arguing at the dinner table. It was as if I were a teenager again. I’ve often dreamed of living in a bedroom with no ceiling over half of it, open to the night sky, with a solid rock wall on one side and sliding doors on another. This seemed to be the same house. Something like the house in Warrensburg, but somehow different. In other dreams, this house has slowly risen upward as if it were a growing tower of stone.

In this dream, I was at the dinner table. Then, suddenly I was on the back porch. It still looked like the “room” that had been set up for me when I was sleeping on the back porch between my freshman and sophomore years. Except in the dream, there was little furniture, no freezer, no old TV from my grandparents, just an old bed and some curtains. I was able to look through the kitchen wall and see the insides of the house, decrepit and broken plaster and wood.

I went to the barn to get my bicycle, and somebody came running up behind me just as I was about to leave the back yard. “Where is my bow and arrows?” I asked. He handed me a bow, but no arrows. I sped off down the side path to the street, and suddenly I was bicycling past the triangle park. Only it turned into a much large city-style park with large dumpsters and vending machines. A dump truck charged toward me, and as I veered away, it lurched back toward the park and disappeared.

Then I felt a pain in my mouth. Lifting a hand to my front teeth, I pulled out a large square and knew that my incisors had been removed.

Dear Diary – March 16, 2004

November 20, 2023
MThomas

[Context: While chaperoning students on overseas study in Perth, Western Australia, I badly burned my feet and back on a beach.]

It is difficult to walk, but today was slightly better than yesterday. Maybe tomorrow will be slightly better than today, and so on. One can only hope; if only life were like that, there would be an end to suffering.

Dhammapada, verse 305

October 14, 2023
MThomas

They who sit alone, sleep alone, and walk alone, who are strenuous and subdue themselves alone, will find delight in the solitude of the forest.

Dear Diary – May 19, 2001

September 15, 2023
MThomas

A story must be more than merely a story. It must be an examination, of the human heart, of the mind, of the spirit. Of experience and existence. A simple recapitulation of one’s personal past or the delusional suffering of a dysfunctional suburban American family have no merit. Overcoming the reality we believe we live in, debunking fiction and elevating the truth, that is worthwhile.

Dear Diary – March 10, 1990

September 13, 2023
MThomas

Sometimes I wish I could put my thoughts directly onto paper. I think all the time, about everything…I see pictures in my head, pictures of my past — exact details of what I saw and experienced. Déjà-vu often occurs to me. It’s strange, that feeling of already having been someplace. Sometimes I can tell what’s going to happen in a matter of minutes. I can’t stand things like that — they send chills up my spine.

Dear Diary – August 2, 1996

September 8, 2023
MThomas

The lecture about Irish folk songs [note: at the time, I was in the Gaeltacht, west of Galway, learning Irish language] last night, two nights ago, whichever (time has no meaning in this place), was wrong. Why do we write, the léachtóir asked; to communicate; the poet wants to communicate.

No.

That is not why I write. Sometimes I write for fun, to play at words, to play with feelings. Sometimes I try to work out my problems myself in writing (I can’t). Sometimes I write just to relieve tension. Sometimes I write because I have to, because if I don’t get these words out of me and onto paper they’ll rip their way out.

Dear Diary – January 24, 1998

September 2, 2023
MThomas

For all these technological “advances,” we are no better than the ancients. We are still prisoners to our emotions — or to the biological impulses of electricity and hormones whose results we deem emotive.

Night owl here! OK also dinner time person (is that a thing?)

August 28, 2023
MThomas

What’s your favorite time of day?

I’ve always been a night owl, always found it easier to concentrate when other brain waves were sleeping and not interfering with mine.

Now, though, I often find the most relaxing time of day is dinner time — because I get to cook for my family!

I never would have said that even five years ago. But the pandemic especially has given me a chance to try out all sorts of recipes, modifying, adding, subtracting as I go. It’s like a chemical experiment 🧪 for our digestive systems!

I can’t wait to get home from work, start up a little Cannonball Adderly, Bill Evans, or Dizzy Gillespie and fire up the grill/wok/air heater and roll up my sleeves.

Of course, I still enjoy the late late hours of a tipple 🥃 and a three-hour YouTube on the rise and fall of the Akkadian Empire (history nerd here). Not enough hours in the day!

Dear Diary – August 26, 1999

August 26, 2023
MThomas

The meek shall only inherit the earth if they can get a long-term mortgage loan floated from the aggressively idle rich.

Dear Diary – Posts from the Past

August 25, 2023
MThomas

I’ve kept a journal (OK, a diary) for many, many years now. It first started in September 1984 as a junior high school 1st year (7th grade) English assignment — each day, we would be given a writing prompt and at the end of the 10-week term (quarterly system back then), the English teacher would look it over and write feedback.

At least, that was the idea. In mid-October my family moved to a county and school system about 60 miles away (it’s more complicated — we couldn’t move in to the new house at first and so my siblings and I were looked after by various relatives, so we didn’t go to school for about nine to ten days). The new school didn’t use journals at all. English class was boring. Grammar and sentence diagramming.

So I kept writing at home, almost on a daily basis in the beginning.

But I’ve been fairly inconsistent over the years. I filled several notebooks, all different sizes and shapes. I stopped writing in one notebook at some point in 1999 when I moved to Japan and started another one. Then some time in 2004 I decided it was a waste of paper not to finish the 1999 one. Then I filled it up and started typing in a Word file. Then I went to Montreal four years ago and started writing in paper notebooks again.

It’s, quite frankly, a great big mess.

But there are some good ideas in these notebooks, and lots and lots of bizarre poems that I swear I do not remember writing. (Also at least half a dozen attempts at “automatic writing.” If you don’t know what that is, look it up.)

So from time to time, I’ll post some bits and pieces here. Just for safe-keeping.

Who knows? I may wind up publishing some of it at some point. Or at least drop some of it into the mouths of future SciFi characters.

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