Sylvie suggested I keep a diary, to care for my days, to reel in my foul funny feelings, to reflect, contemplate, light a candle in the dark corner of the mind’s attic. She even bought me a little pocket notebook, with which I now wobbled down to the beach, wondering what to write, when, how, where. I had laughed, because my days were so full of nothing, nothing sure to write about. At first I thought she was kidding. But she said I missed the point, which was to interrogate oneself, one’s actions and inactions, hits and misses. At that I balked. Keep track of your seven deadly sins, she said, giving me some ideas to write about. Those were, she reminded me, in alphabetical order: anger, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, and sloth. Notice how commonplace the words are, Sylvie said. It’s almost impossible to pass a day without experiencing one of them. If you fast, for example, are you not being a glutton of denial. I wasn’t likely to go on a fast, I said, but again, I apparently missed the mark. We fast from things other than food, Sylvie said. We all the time fast from what is good for us, and that’s a deadly sin. But to complicate matters even more, I had forgotten to pack a pen with me down to the beach with my little notebook. It was also a beautiful morning, full of graceful offshore breezes as the Santa Ana devil winds had abated. I wanted to run down the tide berm run into the water high stepping the expelling waves and dive under a thin lipped curl held up by a breeze, waiting for me. The water was cold and the cold bees stung the skin and I sprinted and dove and swam out past the break, all seven deadly sins flying off from the cold and sudden exercise. Outside the break I stopped and treaded water and turned to watch the beach from the water and suddenly remembered the little notebook Sylvie had given me, which was in the pocket of my swim trunks, soaking wet. Uh, oh, I said to myself and any fishes nearby, an eighth deadly sin.
“Dear Diary,” is episode 64 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.
The Coming of the Toads 