These are the collected journals of my friend, Vincent Pantaglia, from a period late in his life. During this time he was furiously documenting his daily activities with the hope of using the material to someday write a novel. When he was unable to finish the journals or to realize his dream of re-working their stories and characters into a fiction, I took the notebooks into my possession for safekeeping after having received them from his family, and out of nostalgia, I suppose.
I knew Vincent in a peculiar way. He and I had been conversing across the country fairly regularly, but hadn't seen each other for years. Mostly, we were distant colleagues ever since high school, where we met. I knew his writing but not his every-day life. I knew him professionally, so to speak, since we were both authors aspirant, but also intimately, as he was revealed through his words, a realm where he exposed his internal self more courageously than he did socially or personally.
Despite my feelings of an abnormal intimacy with Vincent, it was still something of a surprise when his family foisted the journals on me at the funeral service, and the circumstance in which I received them troubled me for a long time. As voices from a dead man, they were more than a little disturbing. Still, I felt a responsibility to make the right use of them and in a way that did him some justice.
After reading through the motley collection of books, I decided to publish them just as they were, including the note that follows this one, though it's … inaccurate, given the current state of things. I've collected them chronologically, keeping them in their original form, aside from editing them for errors. I've also tried to make mention, where I think it is appropriate, of the form in which I've found the texts. They were stacked rather randomly in a box when I first received them, but their order was relatively easy to decipher. My friend, I discovered, was curiously meticulous in marking down the order in which the journals were written, but their dating is inconsistent. He numbered them, and it seems he did so chronologically, but the specific dates are largely absent. As a result, I've got a series of journals and a series of narratives, each a part of the others, but in what way, I can't say.
For what it's worth, here they are. I found that the true story of his life, as he saw it, had developed into a more meaningful narrative than any fiction he might have been able to wring out of it.
