Listening again this morning during a lull in the workday. When I got to the end of the episode with Michael's voice over something struck me.... He's writing in the way past tense. This journal entry is being written after the events that occur 4 months after the events of 38-3... In a lot of cases, we are reading/hearing read journal entries that were written close in time to the events covered. In some cases that's obviously not true (Kalani catching up the events leading up to him being at the Tower was obviously not written until after he got to the Tower and Burt obviously wasn't writing in a journal while in Scratch's fun dungeon).

"How optimistic we were. And foolish... It would be 4 months before we would find something..."

Does this mean that Michael didn't journal during that time (unlikely) or that nothing worth transferring to the "master record" occurred (maybe implied)? Anyway, this almost comes of as something other than a regular journal entry to me. Almost like Michael might be responding to someone else asking him a question. I assumed at first that the scritch-scritch of pencil on paper was Michael writing. But it could just as easily be someone else recording what he is saying during questioning....

Maybe it does play out like Merlin1274 thinks it will.

Either way, it also points to Michael surviving long enough after the upcoming events to either write it down or be questioned.