Notebook Update

You may recall my plan to start carrying a notebook with me. If you click on that link, it will show you what I started out with a couple of months ago.

This is what is looks like now:

Notebook - The Front

Notebook - The Back

Notebook - The Bloody Parts

All used up. Now there's some symbolism for you.

As you can see, I've blurred the writing some. Not that it matters, since, at a guess, there aren't three other humans on earth who could read my scrawl at the best of times. But the fact that I have to blur pages on the off chance that one of those three reads this slop is testament to what finally went into the thing.

I'd originally planned to use it to get ideas down before I lost them, and for awhile that was fine. But it's been a long couple of months, and it became a diary -- some good stuff, fun stuff, high-caliber pleasure and humor and observations and people and places, but it's mostly a long scream, pain and blood and fury and howling bits, things roaring up out of dark places, thoughts forever behind my eyes, anger and betrayal I'll never say, letters I'll never send, obscurely self-referential black-veined fictions and poetry...

It's all written real time, as it happened, flowing through the never-healing wound of the pen.

I again find to my fresh bemusement how connected to a piece of paper one can feel with a pen in hand. Astonishing, really. It's like being at the top of  that first big roller-coaster hill, that split second when everything stops at the highest peak, just before you cascade over the far side. For a bit that stretches out like pulled taffy, it doesn't feel like you're going anywhere, just stuck in that moment from where you can see forever...then you put the pen to paper and write a couple of words, almost at random, then more, and more again, crashing down the slope faster and faster until the words are rushing past in an eye-watering blast; it's impossible to get it scrawled down, the paper nearly tearing under the furious assault, ink flowing like water, sloshing in great looping trails over lines, uncontrolled, sloppy, chaos constrained to 3½ X 5½ ivory pages...

Can't read a fucking word of it, of course.

Ha! Not true. As has happened before when I physically connect with a page, I can say without false modesty and with no particular pride that it's some of the best writing I've ever done. And there are probably only about six pages of it that can ever see daylight.

The only question at this point is whether I just chuck it into a safe deposit box somewhere for about ten years or find an incinerator. I could scan and PDF it all into encrypted files, I suppose. But there's no point to it really. It's a solo exercise, private work, and pain incarnate in the wrong hands.

So. Incinerator it is.

Time for a new notebook. Bought it this afternoon. I wanted a big one, one of the 8X10s in order to make it easier to get the molten flow onto a page before it's gone. But I simply must have something I can carry with me 24/7, never go anywhere without it being with me, never have it out of my possession, never accidentally leave it laying around.

So, then small-sized again, slid into the back pocket of whatever pants I'm wearing that day, waiting for me to stop in parking lots or airports or cafes, or along the side of the road or between TV programs, or at the water's edge or waiting for meetings, service, coffee, trains, planes, any of the million deadening pauses in life, and slash my wrists into it yet again.