A few months back I got a call from my dad. All of those boxes of mine in the garage, the stack that grew with each move, those – they had to go. He was selling the house and tossing anything I didn’t come for. Anything I didn’t save from the dumpster.
I went through ten boxes of what can be best described as “stuff.” Broken toys. Undeveloped film. Magazines, cassette tapes, VHS sets of television shows. I decided I only had room at my one bedroom apartment for a single box. After going through everything I had saved since the fourth grade, what I ended up with was a box of notebooks and drawing pads. That’s it. Everything else was useless.
I have a habit of buying notebooks. Bound sheets of college-ruled paper. Pads of varying size and sheet thickness. White. Off white. Smooth. Grained. Rough. Most only get a few pages used, then get tucked away for safe keeping. After awhile I color coded them – the blue notebook would be for stories, yellow for notes and the red, that would be for the ideas that made it passed the blue or yellow stages.
With computers and blogs my notebook habit has pretty much disappeared.
Until now.
This Star Wars Moleskine notebook was a Christmas present. I have yet to put a pen to its pages. I’m not ready. See, you have to be ready. Have a plan. Will this new notebook be for drawings? Stories? Notes? A diary? One thing I’ve always wanted to try my hand at was writing jokes, this could the notebook to get me on my way.
TANGETIAL SIDE NOTE: That’s one thing that stops progress. “I will move forward as soon as I get FILL IN THE BLANK.”
In a movie or a TV show It always happens. the character has just completed something or gotten out of something – jail, marriage, a new job and they call it “having a clean slate.” From this new and fresh point in their life they feel that they can finally move on. Start over. Do what they always dreamed of.
That’s a fresh notebook. Clean. It can be whatever I make it. I can make myself whatever I want to be, and as each page fills up I become more of that thing, that ideal that I set out to achieve.
One of my earliest notebooks that I can remember is from the fourth grade. My favorite video game at the time was Baseball for the Nintendo. The game didn’t keep track of your games or stats, all you could do was play a game and then play another. No saving. So I tracked an entire season of my game playing. Every player’s at bat and pitches was documented with my blue Bic pen and notebook. By the end of the summer I had a notebook full of stats and records that only made sense to me. I had become a mini-sportswriter. My own Sporting News in a taped up Mead notebook.
That notebook of goals I started, it created a version of myself as an achiever. The one full of drawings, that was me as an artist. During family vacations to National Parks, my notebooks of drawings and notes on the animals and nature we saw made me a scientist. Of course I was really none of those things, but in those notebooks I was all of them.
Now, I have to start again. My Star Wars Moleskine (the finest of notebooks) is waiting. It’s the perfect size for an address book. A list of names. Quickly jotted down notes. But it also fits snug in my back pocket. With 2012 being the year that the wife and I have set to start having children, maybe it can be our notebook of potential baby names.
When my wife and I are old and finally moving out of the home that our kids grew up in, I can call them up and say, “Come get your stuff out of the garage.” They’ll sort through their own years of “stuff” and find this notebook too, flip through it and say, “You almost named me Grand Moff Tarkin?”
