I return to my little red journal every morning. It records a dump of my thoughts, all the things I’d have otherwise just whispered to myself in the rocking chair downstairs, I write into a red book with tight-squared graph paper pages. I have no intention of ever going back and reading this book. It’ll take a big lump of courage but I imagine once it’s full I’ll want to find a suitable fire to chuck the whole thing into. The point isn’t posterity, it’s catharsis.

It’s me in there, obviously. My hands and eyes and a pen dutifully take dictation. So if I have a day where I eat a lot of sugary crap and additional stuff between meals and another little something after the kids have been put to bed, I come to find out the next morning that the failure of this is what’s on my mind. 300 words in a morning about how easy it should be and how weak I must be. I am a little tired of that guy taking up the pages of my one precious morning journal. And, look, it seems obvious that it’s my hands moving my pen and I could just put something else in there. But on those mornings if I try to escape what’s honestly smoldering in my head, asking to be poured out, if I don’t write the tired “I did it again” confession, complaint, whining, whinging, complaining, complaining, snivelling song that we’re all so tired of, I find myself staring at the blank page. The loser in me has a song that no one wants to hear, but he is actually very good at making sure no one else can be heard either as long as he’s in the room.

And so I have to try to have good days. In the moment I try to recall that if I wait to be alone in the kitchen and secretly shove a piece of the kids’ Halloween or Christmas or Easter candy into my face like a heist, I’m inviting in the sad sack. I’m courting another morning where my mind, which might have come up with something beautiful and profound, or at least something that makes me smile to myself, is going to give me nothing but the old shit. A grown man’s ramblings should be about parenthood and courage and the president and leaking pipes and old paintings and the pits of isolation, not cookies, not marshmallows, not instant oatmeal. Not lists of everything I eat with green checkmarks next to the acceptable items.

I’m trying to think of something to call that version of myself, because all I’ve come up with is “Whiny Little Bitch.” And that’s crass. Maybe a name that’s neutral enough that its association with this character is all it needs to be come pejorative. Like with bands, even a bad name for a band becomes a perfect name if the band is good enough. A good name for someone I don’t want to let into my house. Daniel or Jeff. Dracula or Sue. Get him the hell out of here. I’m trying to think.