A Note on my Notebooks

This is actually the (slightly edited) first page of the first entry in a journal I recently started

Tuesday, July 9, 2024

Saturday singlehandedly catalyzed me to start this journal. I kind of dislike journaling. Especially with pen and paper. My thoughts move faster than my hand which always ends up sore. I can never land on a consistent format. Should my entries be about my emotions? More biographical? Who is my audience? Myself? God (already omniscient)? My grandkids, who will rummage through and bicker over my belongings when I die? And I am never persuaded enough to be consistent about journaling. I have many notebooks. I consistently carry a black hardcover 9”x12” sketchbook with me in which—in the same style as John Cage or perhaps as a high school junior scribbling ACT math problems on a looseleaf sheet of paper—I write everything. In a way only I need to understand. Each sketchbook lasts about a year. My current one has plans for protest actions: scrapped, soiled, still in the works. All of the above. It has shopping and to-do lists side-by-side. Quotes from Life of Pi, which I (finally) finished yesterday. The novel by Yann Martel, not the Hollywood adaptation. It has phone numbers I hurriedly jotted down while on the phone. Ok go ahead. Fleeting thoughts. Failed attempts at a poem for a friend. Lists of people I am thinking about. Praying for. Speculative budgeting.

The rest of my notebooks get less love and support. I actually have a notebook designated for budgeting. It's a small black spiral notebook. I barely use it. I have a larger faux leather black notebook for the aforementioned lists: Albums with no skips; Words you can grammatically use twice consecutively (ex. “had” as in “I had had an everything bagel before, but this one seemed to really have everything). I have a thick brown journal in which I write letters to God. Someone got me this one as a gift. I can’t remember who. I usually crack this one open on the first or last day of the year. Sometimes on my birthday. Times when I am at my most reflective. It is interesting to skim back and see the foolishness I was praying about in, say, 2019. I have a purple journal where I write medical notes because I always forget my symptoms when I am sitting in the doctor’s office. I have a black journal that holds sermon notes because I always forget what my pastor said when I’m sitting at home. My small pocket-sized purple composition notebook is for creative ideas that come to me from out and about the world. I just bought another black one on Sunday. I haven’t written in it yet though. My black notebook that looks like a novel is for my notes as I read the Bible top to bottom. No skips. The skinny cheap one with the rubber band to hold it shut is for writing poetry in. I haven’t touched it with a pen in years, but some of my best poems are in there (I fell off). I wrote one about transferring between train lines once while I was locked outside in the rain.

In theory, these are all consolidated in my 9”x12” sketchbook. That book isn’t the right place for a true journal entry though. It’s too loose. I journal in it sometimes, but it always feels misplaced. I can’t be honest with myself adjacent an ingredient list for goat pepper soup. So, I found this composition notebook in the drawer where most of my other journals sleep.

Except the list one. I don’t know where I put that.