2003-04-01 - 3:07 a.m.

The journalists themselves have been news of late, and I�ve been thinking about my role as a diarist. I pass judgment with contempt far more frequently than I relay facts with objectivity, or compassion for that matter.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I�ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven�t had the advantages you�ve had.

He didn�t say any more, but we�ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I�m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought--frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.

It is with much regret that I abandon this narrative. As much as I have grown since taking up the online pen, I have not once lived to the standards I had then set. My apologies go equally to those who have been bludgeoned my my words, and to those who have enjoyed reading along as I bludgeon my words.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

--Hemingway