New Notebooks Make the World Go Round

A blank page in a used book is not even remotely the same!

Once upon a time, there was nothing written down whatsoever… And it was a beautiful thing.

(Sigh.) Well, I’ll be!

Tell me: Have you seen something so perfectly potential?!

I have a penchant for fresh notebooks and mechanical pencils. It seems every time I go to the store, I buy a new notebook. I have dozens of them just sitting around. — Richard Paul Evans

He’s as right as rainbows. There is nothing more exciting to a writer than a fresh, unadulterated pile of blank paper — a heuristic for existential knots.

Then the first page is sullied… and the undefined, all of a sudden, is carved in stone.

When it was new, it meant something important! Now it will sit sideways — as I reach for still another fresh stack — and wait for a much less hopeful day, a looking-back (filling the voids) kind of day.

Those days happen too (when I prowl the mad, half-empty streets of my paper trail).

Maybe other creatives — the sketchers and architects, the composers — can relate. Maybe the graffiti virtuosos feel the same way about plain white-washed walls—

but I can’t speak for them…

I’m a writer.

Life is measured, for me, in tidy piles of filagreed phrases and quaint analogies. The more I manage to write — the closer I get to accurately transcribing my peculiar madness — the more it all makes sense.

Silly, right?

Writers know this. And we steal away into dark corners, nonetheless, with our empty notebooks and ballpoint pens. Heaven, forbid the world from interloping — from hoping, after all, that we surrender to so-called “real life”.

It is real… most of it (we know this too).

But so is this notebook open in front of me: spoiled now, perhaps (with the first draft of the very piece you’re reading, cleanly torn free along its cheap, perforated edge and bent out of shape — shoved in between two of the back pages) but it’s the only paper around…

And it’s nearly full.

Still new, I tell myself, and close it before I say too much. I’ve composed less deserving quips on first pages anyway (and ripped them out just as readily) only to wonder whether anyone heard me talking.

I’m giving all that I have in this life. I’m opening up my notebook, and I’m saying everything in there out loud. — Kanye West

Iconoclasts: storytellers can’t be anything else. Clowns, maybe (but one of my notebooks told me that comedy is the original skin of contrarians and killers).

The written word is a line in the sand. A sword sheathed, waiting. Blank paper: the beach on which we make that stand.

A war zone.

Fire in the hole, we should yell with each page down…

And the victors are always those writers with bigger stockpiles of crisp, new notebooks to sully and toss like hand grenades. The losers always read whole pages, of whole volumes, and weep as if the world is out of paper.

Eureka!

I just found another one — an obnoxious blue pattern on the cover — that I had bought a few days ago, and pushed way back among the spent explosives!

And I have never seen something so perfectly potential.

So I’ll sit this one sideways, start fresh for now and wait… for a much less hopeful day.