item description: a notebook
I got this when the large, ancient, eight-person house I lived in got bedbugs. We had a company come in and heat treat the house to get rid of them, which as near as I could tell worked, but then, I never saw the bedbugs in the first place. On the day of the heat treatment, the house was, of course, uninhabitable, so one of my housemates and I wandered around the area, looking for a way to kill time. And we encountered a bookstore called something like "East to West", and I said, "Bookstores seem like a good way to kill some time."
I had figured that "East to West" was meant to suggest, you know, books from all over, invoking the image of the itinerant wayfarer. It was, instead, a "metaphysical bookstore," which means it sells, you know, books on crystal healing and similar woo vibes. Which, hey, no shame if that's your thing, but it isn't mine, and it is definitely not the vibe I was going for. For whatever reason I felt distinctly unwelcome in this place, and I decided to resolve this tension by doing the one thing in a capitalist society that always makes you belong: I bought something. I found a notebook with a cool design, and I bought it. Then I carried that around as we kept a-wanderin' the rest of the day.
Someone once saw the design and immediately said "Oh, I didn't know you were a fan of Gustav Klimt." I was not; I just thought it looked neat. I still do! It's neat.
One of the oldest pieces of writing I've done that I haven't blocked out of my memory entirely was a series of posts about someone who found a leather-bound notebook at a rest stop along I-90 and spirals into obsessive behavior over finding its owner. It was all very House of Leaves, and isn't very interesting to read back on now, but for the longest time I've had this idea that there is something magical about a notebook, that ideally they should have a history.
I ended up buying a leather-bound notebook of my own, with the text "CARPE DIEM" on the front, largely because this was a thing that I had written and helped shape my early style. I used this for possibly the most hubristic project I could possibly imagine: I decided to just put a story in it that would fill it from cover to cover. This was meant to be the finished product, not the first draft (I don't really draft, anyway1); I'm sure I still have that lying around somewhere but I have no idea where. It will certainly never be finished.
That ended up becoming something that was too nice to just take around with me and write things in, so I bought some cheap tiny composition notebooks for that, except those were so cheap they just sort of disintegrated in my bag, so that didn't work out either. And then I just never followed up with more durable notebooks, for some reason.2 But it did help break the spell, at least: notebooks aren't magic. The point is they let you write things in them.
The notebook I got during our brief bedbug exile is durable enough that it can survive being hauled around places but it's a little big for the sort of portability that I actually want. It's great for bringing on trips, though, and I've been gradually filling it up with little story fragments and character sketches. But I have finally made the effort3 to find something that is both durable enough and small enough for me to take around with me everywhere, and the inestimable Alli of InnerSpiral was kind enough to recommend me Field Notes, which . . . looks like what I've been looking for this whole time. I'm excited to try them out.
Remind me to make this post I've been thinking about of the most memorably bad pieces of writing advice I've received in my time in this vale of tears; one of them came from a creative writing professor who was deeply in the blood, sweat, and tears school of writing and really did not like my process (though that is unrelated to the bad advice I received from her).↩
Neurosis.↩
Asked on social media.↩