>>5524637During your skimming you observe a few things. Your uncle doesn't have much to say about most days, at least not in his 20s. Work was ok. Cheryl made meatloaf for dinner. It was good. I beat my record at the golf course by two strokes. Stuff like that. The only times it does go in depth, he's usually gushing about his fiance or complaining about something going wrong at work. You tend to skim over that. Occasionally he talks about meeting with some of his friends. Roy and Pierce are the names you see repeated among them.
You speed up your pace as you go on, trying to get through them as quick as possible while just getting an idea of what was going on. 24, he gets married to Cheryl and they buy a house. As they hit 25, they're talking about having kids. You do manage to catch a couple mentions of his younger brothers. At some point you see a mention of your 15 year-old father getting caught drinking and being made to join his school's math team as punishment. ...You're going to have to remember that story.
"August 14th, 1982... August 16th, 1982... August 17th, 1982... wait, what?" It skipped a day. That's a first. You look over the entry for August 16th in detail. "Called in sick but got some chores done. Burned the trash and did some yardwork. I'm exhausted. Might have to call out again tomorrow." The next day's entry just says "I called out. Feeling a little better. I decided to plant a tree in the backyard." Nothing of note then. Guess he got the flu or something.
You're not quite sure when it started, but the entries get drier. He doesn't really mention anyone else by name, or interactions with others at all. Just what he did that day. The mood seems gloomier. He mentions being tired a lot, and not getting enough sleep. He considers getting sleeping pills. Maybe what he called out for was a lot worse than the flu.
August 15th, 1983. He hasn't mentioned his wife or friends for the past year. But this entry breaks that. "It's been a year since Cheryl left. I wonder what I did to make her so dissatisfied." Then it continues on, as if nothing happened. The entries don't really tell much- you start skipping through some of them until you hit the next August 15th. "They said I'd feel better with time. They were wrong."
Starting the next year, journal entries on August 15th disappear completely, as if he'd rather not talk about it, even to himself. The mood seems to improve, slightly, slowly. He starts recording how many questions he guesses right on Jeopardy. Sometimes he'll mention having bought a novel and how he liked it.
In 1989 things seem to take a downturn. In early September he starts writing a lot about religious texts, and what they might mean. Not too odd at first, but it gets worse after the new year. Talk of patterns in everything. Mystical powers. Things from beyond that can be reached out to. The Jeopardy scores stay the same, but everything else is nonsensical to you.
