Journal

This is the journal — short prose written close to the day. Entries land here first as drafts and stay drafts. Some are linked from essays later; most are not. None are in the sidebar, the feeds, search results, or any of the machine-readable indexes. They live on this page. You are welcome to read them.

The longer, more finished work is in Essays. The journal is what the essays look like before they have earned their length.

The form is older than the internet. Whitman kept Specimen Days; Thoreau kept his journals at Walden; Marcus Aurelius wrote what he thought he might want to read tomorrow. The discipline is to write something true at small scale, often, and to let the archive do the work that any single entry cannot.