Completely in the Dark

At first I considered this a “failed thought experiment.”

It probably came to me in the middle of the night, when I couldn’t get back to sleep.

“What if,” my stupid, unsleepy monkey mind thought, “you wrote a blog post about three different Octobers, ten years apart?”

Since I last left off writing about 1985, I’d read through the journals for 1995 and ’05. If there were entries on the same date during those years, I’d start there for material.

BOOM. Immediate roadblock when I opened the 2005 journal: Not a single entry all that October.

But the other years fared better: four entries in 1995, and five in ’85. If I was going to keep it to three years, ten years apart, I was going to have trouble straight out of the gate.

But here’s the interesting thing about failed thought experiments—they take you to places you…