by Richard McLaughlin
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My idea for keeping a journal extime came from my engagement with the writing of Annie Ernaux, whose work, moving ambiguously between the registers of memoir, ethnography, and fiction, has been very significant to me professionally and personally. She lays out her ideas on such a writing practice in her introduction to Journal du dehors (1993, translated as Exteriors, 1996), though I guess some critic came up with the intime / extimebinary. Anyway, if a journal intime is the classic form of the diary, a book under lock and key that contains one’s innermost thoughts and desires, the journal extime is a radically different form of arriving at subjectivity, by means of a diligent reporting on the world outside: “I felt the urge to transcribe the scenes, words and gestures of unknown people whom one meets once and whom one never sees again; graffiti hastily scribbled on walls and erased; sentences overheard on the radio and news items read in the papers. Anything that, in some way or another, moved me, upset me or angered me” (Ernaux 1996). Already the line between recording and revealing that is key to documentary is blurred in the urge that Ernaux recalls, and in the frisson of the accidental encounter that triggers each entry. This is not the camera-pen as passive instrument, regardless of how flat and descriptive she attempts to keep the writing.
Ernaux again, observing that she was writing a memoir far more true than one that privileges the “I” as conscious actor: “I realize that I have put a lot of myself into these texts, far more than originally planned – memories and obsessions subconsciously dictating my choice of words and the scenes I wished to freeze” (Ernaux 1996). Of course. As if any writing could be any different. But still, an important reflection on the ever-present hand invisibly guiding “intentionality.” “It is other people – anonymous figures glimpsed in the subway or in waiting rooms – who revive our memory and reveal our true selves through the interest, the anger or the shame that they send rippling through us” (Ernaux, 1996). What I love about Ernaux’s formulation is that shared space is the starting point for a coming-to-realization of one’s self, but not in the old guard cogito ergo sum. Instead, you are adrift in the past while navigating the present, traversing a Proustian scene where any detail could send you into involuntary reverie. Your specific details, the ones that make up your factic blueprint in the Sartrean sense, will, given the right set of circumstances and reception, trip you up like Marcel’s cobblestones at the end of A la recherche du temps perdu.
Lofty ancestry, humble results? I certainly say “I” more than I’d like and deviate at times from the imperative to record in order to reveal. But Ernaux and Proust are good guides in this journey to relate a bit of myself through chance encounters with others.
- RM, 1/17/26
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8/21/25
About 6:30 AM, a morning in the height of summer. Better to get up early before it’s too hot to do anything, plus the added benefit that the baby is still sleeping (time to write, do other things on various chaotic to-do lists, sit for an hour on the toilet scrolling on social media or shopping).
In the cafeteria that extends off of the lobby of the hotel in which I’m staying, there’s a TV strategically based at the corner of the L-shaped room. The sound is unavoidable, if not the picture, which can be deftly blocked by the listener turning their back to it. I wonder sometimes about this mandated audiovisual “layer” in public spaces, sort of like the canned music in grocery or department stores.1 Here, it seems like a sensory deterrent against bad behavior, a means of keeping everyone focused on their meal / phones and not talking too loudly. The late-capitalist equivalent to the private magical thinking in childhood that a light left on or a TV / radio playing would keep the bad guys / monsters away.
Anyway, the TV. As I try to read and take notes for a project I’m working on, the sound of the morning news broadcast keeps pulling me back in to listen. The cadence of the anchor’s speech, the rigorous structure of the different segments, the disconcerting (if one is unaccustomed to watching this sort of programming) tonal jump from the serious / fear-mongering to the playful, even within the same segment!
To take one example – toward the end of the segment cycle (because, somewhat like the 24-hour news stations, these segments can repeat, I suppose to service viewers tuning in who wake up at different times, or to keep costs down / save time), there’s a “local color” story. Except it’s not really local.2 I heard the story in snippets (paraphrased here):
"Some campers got more than they bargained for on a recent stay near Lake Tahoe. 4 campers contracted the plague – yes, the same disease 25 million people died from during the middle ages [fact checking needed here]…”
It was enough to make me turn my head and look at the B-roll that constituted the visual storytelling aspect. There was footage of chipmunks moving in and out of their burrows, interspersed with the refracted light of ambulances and the facade of a Tahoe hospital, then people moving about the interior of the hospital (presumably, the same one).
It was a little hard to hear at this point but I believe the chipmunks were to illustrate that at high elevations, bacteria that cause the disease can be passed on from fleas that live on rodents. The anchors were quick to dispel any fears: “Don’t be alarmed, medical experts say that such cases, while rare, are regularly documented, with 7 new infections a year, and that patients are treated with antibiotics."
The next part of the story to catch my ear was the banter between the male and female anchor to close the segment:
M: "Imagine calling into work one morning, 'I can't come in today, I've got the plague!'" (faking a cough)
F: (feigning alarm, putting out hands and backing away) "Stay away!"
M: (chuckling) "And we can joke about this because the people affected are receiving treatment…"
It was all too perfect, pat, an ironed-out fait divers grown stale by the sheer repetition of the genre. The anchors present a shocking / alarming fact, then immediately take the wind out of it by explaining, hey, we live in the modern world, we have antibiotics, not like those poor souls consigned to the oblivion of death rolls and the weakness of historical memory. To what extent is a story like this scripted? Even his joke and her reaction seemed straitjacketed by muscle memory and generic convention.
I couldn’t help feeling like this type of story acts as a pernicious deflection for its target audience, which I would assume is retirement-age working-class people. Especially after a global pandemic that shut down economies and killed over one million people in the US ("the most of any country" according to Wikipedia), mostly in said audience’s age group. But also a deflection from everything else. A little, self-contained moment of frisson, where the feeling of being close to medieval terror masks the banal terror of contemporary life.
So, a shocking tidbit to tell others, a little “color” to start the day, along with the first cup of coffee.
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8/27/25
Two character studies (and ancillary studies) at the donut shop.
1. A woman who stands out to me by virtue of her body language and movements, which in their stiffness and attitude suggest both a difficult life and a stop-motion bird, hopping and flitting from gesture to gesture. She's giving the counter ladies a hard time, taking too long to pay for her order.
She keeps asking for more things, adding on, small complaints, “No not that one! It's black,” meaning burnt, presumably.
2. A man, from bearing, tone of voice, vocabulary, and peripheral vision, a white working class male in his 40s or 50s. "I think he was here before me," referring to me. The lady at the counter tries to explain, in her fast accented English, that I'm waiting for my order. "Hey boss," over her, "were you ready to order?" A courtesy overlaying a deep rudeness, slighting her because of her gender / race / lack of assimilation? Annoyed, I say in a flat voice, gesturing to the lady who has given him correct information, "I've already been helped." Me, to him: overeducated millennial liberal who never looks up from his phone. Him, to me: undereducated product of the culture that produced the headline-grabbing President and his gang of history-trampling miscreants. So we've "seen" each other. His order, a caricature, just like the one I've produced of him: a ham egg and cheese sandwich on a croissant "with extra mayo" (she finishes his sentence, he must come here often) and a Monster energy drink.
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9/21/25
Two women talking at a table on a restaurant patio. One of them shows a lack of confidence, an insecurity in her ability to "sell" an anecdote she’s relating or even an opinion she has.
A few lines of her speech, recorded here:
"And, like, whenever anyone says to them 'you guys look alike' they're like, ugh... They make a face."
"I don't know, I feel like that'd be fun, to go to a [football] game. On a Saturday."
A distraction from their chatter - a mother by the parking lot yelling at her two kids that slipped away, and who are playing in the car... The two women fall silent for a moment, analyzing, scrutinizing.
As they stand up to leave, (gliding?) to the trash can to toss away a napkin and gather themselves, I confirm what became clearer in the course of listening to them. It isn't two grown women as I'd thought when I saw them in my peripheral vision as I sat down. Instead, it is a daughter, high school age, and her mother, wearing essentially the same style (the standard for women of this class and part of town): athletic wear, a hoodie made of synthetic sweat-wicking material, yoga pants, a zip-up collared long-sleeve shirt, form-fitting, speaking to their active lifestyle that cuts through all other situations.
It makes sense. They had a mother-daughter dynamic - one solidifying the behavior, mental comportment, and speech of the other. One becoming the other to a degree.
And suddenly, a gem. A young boy, suburban, secure, and obnoxious, plays on the sidewalk in front of the cafe tables. Property of the comfortable lilywhite family that has taken up outsize residence beneath the patio umbrellas a few tables down. Hopping despite the lack of hopscotch squares. Passing by, a man in black hoodie, black pinstripe shorts, calf tattoo, orange and black umbrella in his hand (Go O's). "Where you hoppin' to?!" he lets fly, with a perfect east Baltimore / waterfront white working class accent. Walks past, on his way to somewhere I know not. A frisson of recognition, or maybe better said: my grandfather who worked as a butcher his whole life, my no-good cousins, a whole side of my life hits me like a brick. So they're still here, the men who hung out in front of the dry-goods shops, amidst the ladies (and ladies-in-waiting) in yoga pants.
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9/23/25
A man wearing a strikingly sour smelling cologne, chewing something (not gum?) in an oblivious and irritating manner. The spatial organization of the shuttle bus seating means that another man is sitting at a 90 degree angle to him, in profile, perpendicular, and it is clear that the former man's noises are indeed irritating to the latter. Furtive looks from the victim, starting dead ahead, lost in reverie, the perpetrator.
Or - a sudden familiar gesture, a look up and wave of the hand from the second man in direction of the first - are they traveling together?
Confirmed. They begin speaking to each other a few minutes into the ride. Conclusion: I'd projected my own frustration at the lack of decorum onto the second man.
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9/27/25
Across from the restaurant patio where I'm eating lunch alone, there's a shop with a cutesy name that sells household goods. In and of itself, it would not be interesting in a neighborhood filled with boutiques catering to the young and the freely spending. However, the long wall facing the restaurant (the store is rectangular) is mostly ceiling-to-floor windows. Therefore, the effect produced is that of watching a movie on the big screen, like the apartment building scene in Tati'sPlaytime. People walk in, almost exclusively in pairs, as this is a neighborhood where couples descend as intra-city tourists to spend their precious weekend hours browsing, and circulate around the space as if projected two-dimensionally from a cinema projector.
The space is narrow and long, and is made even narrower by another rectangular, a long heavy wooden table that nests in the center of the room and where much of the stores wares are placed. The placement is crucial, in terms of the socioeconomics of taste; instead of the heaping piles of goods and the overlapping displays of a 99 cent or secondhand store, here each object is carefully discrete, with equal blank space isolating each example.
To consider the objects themselves, here's a cursory list: pottery, glasses, wooden spoons, cutting boards, picture frames, mugs, espresso cups, saucers, plates, ladders made from large bamboo stalks, pots for plants... We could add to this a list of clothing and aesthetic choices that create patterns as the talent step two-by-two on and off-screen: light-colored canvas ball caps, fancy trainers, flare leg jeans, shirts with designer logos, white shirts, black shirts, tattoos. And drinks, lots of iced drinks in single-use plastic cups with lids. Finally, significant patterns of behavior and anomalies. Younger couples scan and pluck at the wares in tandem, while older couples are often separated by a more coherent gender gap, the man reading the store as feminine and lingering by the front, holding bags from previously visited shops and sipping from his plastic cup's straw, impatiently. One man lost in thought, leaning on the big table at its center, his eyes scanning the room mechanically, as his partner coolly darts from cup to cup, plate to plate.
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1 Is this still a thing? It must be, but it is somehow so inoffensive that it melts away completely into the background, whereas music in large retail clothing stores [JC Penney, DXL, DSW…] is loud, mediocre, and extremely annoying. Notes to self: listen for canned music in the grocery store. Write about the “history” of canned music in grocery stores, ex. M’s distaste for the eponymous Talk Talk song. Do a comparison of store music / write on the extreme musical experience of stores like JC Penney – is the soundtrack specifically chosen to shuffle customers through the space more quickly? A cheap means of providing a score that is unintentionally obtrusive? Clearly licensed library music that is specifically recorded to sound like modern pop hits at a fraction of the cost.
2 This led me to wonder whether the local affiliate I was watching (ABC 7) was owned by the Sinclair Group. AtToW (at the time of writing – any way to make this less clunky? Time of narrative? Genette), I noted, “Is this channel owned by the Maryland company that owns 60% of local news channels?” Just now (time of narration), I read a bit online about this media conglomerate, who I first heard about from a Last Week Tonight with John Oliver segment. A quick search pulled up a tool (https://apps.voxmedia.com/at/vox-sinclair-map/) that showed a searchable map and the regions of the US where Sinclair has a stake. According to said map, as of 8/27/25, the company owns 193 stations that reach 40% of the American viewing public. All this is moot because ABC 7 isn’t owned by a company like Sinclair; it is, of course, owned by ABC. But the homogeneity of local news broadcasts and their tendency toward conservative fear-mongering (see the Oliver segment) stands as a valid concern, as evidenced in the segment I analyze above.
Side note – both Sinclair Group and ABC function in my personal geography. The latter in a far less sinister fashion – I would pass by the studios with L when we’d walk along the river path in Glendale. Sinclair lurks in a corner of the Maryland suburbs about 10 minutes from the house where I lived in college. However, I didn’t know of its home until I got off on the wrong exit on a visit to see my old roommate. I ended up on a road that services the local landfill and recycling center. Tucked away on this commercially busy but, to my mind, secluded road, away from the public’s prying eyes, is Sinclair HQ.
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Richard McLaughlin is a writer, educator, and musician based in Pasadena, CA.
Listen to his music here: https://rmclaughlin.bandcamp.com/