While going through my journal pages — the ones that will end up scanned and placed into book pages — you will undoubtably come across about one crossed out word on each page, or some similar imperfection that I spent little-to-no time correcting. An example:
#####Why do I do this?#####
I do this for a number of reasons. First of all, I never make a mistake on purpose. Then it wouldn’t be a “mistake.” It would be, at worst, idiotic, and at best, a shallow attempt at art, in my opinion. But I am attempting to create art here. Art based on non-fiction with a certain pretense… but still art.
And part of my goal with it is to recreate something that never existed before: a travel journal with an account of the places I saw and the things I did. And part of beauty in creating a [written] journal is that you can’t backspace your mistakes. The best you can do is bring white-out and blot out memories line by line. I didn’t want to do this. So if a drunk hand used the letter “d” instead of “g” (or vice-versa; I do this constantly, both on keyboards and on paper), I make a snap decision of whether to cross it out or try to “convert” it to what I meant to write. Or if I use a word incorrectly, and I catch it, I fix it, first crossing out the failed word.
And if I miss a mistake? Well, that’s OK too. For now. I’m not sure what to do about mistakes that other people find, or that I find later when I transcribe the text onto my computer for posterity. I’ll write about that when I figure it out. For now, I keep track of them by writing “[sic]” next to the mistakes when I type up the journal pages.