college-ruled, replacements and aisle 9

i used to love blank notebooks. not ones that i'd used and just torn the pages out of, those aren't the same, they're marred with indentations from everything i'd written and then decided wasn't worth a damn and threw away. it's too hard to start over when you're constantly reminded of your past failings. whenever i felt like i had something important to write down, which at that point in my life was quite often (notice the qualification "felt like i") i'd always want to start a new notebook. the first entries of all my old journals are all full of the overly dramatic, and whatever event or person or impulse inspired that first entry always bled into the ones that followed. my journals always became thematic, petering out when the subject lost relevance, initiating another car drive to Longs Drugs and the inevitable debate over which color notebook i wanted this time.

i bought the black and white composition books, filling an entire one in Jr. High with poetry that seemed worth a great deal of my adolescence committing to paper. they were about feelings i'd never really felt, full of words i barely knew with the kind of generic rhyme schemes characteristic of a thirteen year-old's attempts at depth. there were a few good four lies here and there but the pages as a whole reek of a need for attention and a much too ardent desire to be profound. but mostly they were the primary colored one-subject deals, the none-spiral ones with easy tear-out pages. since i knew i'd be tearing out quite a few.

i've always written a lot of stuff down. After the poetry phase it was long rants that could take up pages at a time, not that that should surprise anyone who knows me, especially those who knew me in high school when my angsty anger phase was at its peak. not that i'm saying it's passed, but the volume's been turned down a bit. Now I confine my journal to a black notebook i've had ever since i lost it's predecessor somewhere in King City during an episode involving the CHP and an expired license I'd rather not talk about. There's three lines of writing to every line of paper. people who've seen it say it looks like the diary of a maniac, but to me this stinginness makes perfect sense.

an entire week fits on one side of a single page; for the first time in it, my life all fits in one place. It seems to have never been spent in one house, in one family, or even in one voice. But now I just take it with me, and when i want to go back I flip a few pages and I'm there.

the indentations on each new page still bother me, but I'm trying to stick with things for once in my life. So I pretend not to see them.

it's still hard to walk past the school supplies aisle and not stop though.

there's just nothing like a new notebook.