Cringography

Tonight is Cringe at Freddy's Bar and Back Room in Brooklyn.

In case you don't know, Cringe is an evening where people with underdeveloped senses of shame and hyperactive senses of humour stand in front of other people and read their past diaries and journals.

I didn't really keep a diary at all, but I did occasionally sit down and try and sort out complicated situations on paper, straighten out my head and happily dramatize away to my heart's content and/or ventricle-rending angst. For some reason these 'Thoughts On Paper' took a very familiar form.
They all have a title - a variation on 'INSERT THING HERE On Paper'. They occur whenever I felt the need to write stuff down. They are full of THINGS IN CAPITALS, self-referential jokes, (lots of brackets) dramatic pauses...and overblown, complex grammar what bends the mind to conjugate.

And the really bad thing is that it all doesn't feel that long ago. I was seventeen, eighteen.

In my bag right now I have a brown folder packed with sheets of A4 lined paper. I took such extreme measures to hide this when I was adding to it on a regular basis that I invested in duct tape. There was a loose floorboard in my bedroom, which over the years had loosened the carpet on top. I began to use it as a little hiding place when I was about 15, but when I started 'Thoughts...' I rearranged my bedroom, but the SOFA on top of the floorboard, taped the carpet to the floorboard so that it didn't ruffle and I still panicked when I realised that my parents had been in my room while I was at school.
I dramatised the security and seriousness of keeping my secrets so much that I even avoided writing the barefaced and absolute truth. How paranoid can you get? Not much more, I think, than this:
When a really juicy situation, packed with shame, guilt and teenage mortification came up I wrote an entire page and a half of A4 in abbreviated words, taking note and making sure that I knew what it all meant as I went along. So dire was the situation I was sure that each letter would be scorched into my mind...a couple of months later I read it again and couldn't understand any of it.
To see the knackered old folder in public last month was...weird.

Anyway.
It's been a month since the last Cringe and I'm feeling a lot better about the word 'attain'.

I'm all set to read again tonight, as are a whole bunch of other people, inlcuding but not limited to those linked above.
Start time is 8.30pm, but it gets packed pretty quickly and it was standing room only before the start last time.
Come along!