[hopefully part one of two; copied from Google Plus]
So prompted by a post* the other day, and brief comment back & forth with Baldur Bjarnason, I dragged my boxes of journals out from under the bed this morning, specifically looking for the period around the 1992 LA riots. I found it: I had one diary volume from December 1991 to August 1992. (The very last page is from my first day in Tacoma!)
And of course the way I remember those days at the end of April and beginning of May is different from what I wrote at the time, but not completely, and it does confirm my feeling of it being — for me — a very transient thing. Everything went crazy for a few days, but it hardly touched me directly, and it was quickly past. My diary goes back to family & dating woes, worry about a friend who didn’t like me anymore, and SO MUCH CALCULUS.
Actually that was probably the biggest surprise in reading a diary I haven’t looked at in years — it looks like I took a lot of notes from calculus class directly into my diary. Of course, my diary was a spiral-bound lined notebook, not a “diary.” I wish I had any idea whatsoever now what all those equations and sketches were about.
More later, I think. Also, when I do get around to writing more, I’m hoping that Kermit and Elizabeth will chime in.
* In which I shared a link posted by Kathy Gill with the note “Reminded somehow of the Kerner Commission (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerner_Commission) – just because rioters are assholes, doesn’t mean that there aren’t serious problems.”