duck-shaped pain

2000-08-30
Where I Pick The Green One

It's always a tough decision, choosing a new paper journal. It takes hours, maybe even days of scouting out potential candidates, looking at them, touching them, feeling their heft, marveling or not-marveling at the texture of their paper. Sometimes you make a correct decision, sometimes you don't, and then you have to put up with it for as long as it takes you to fill the book.

I didn't need a new one right away -- I just decided to get a smaller journal to carry around in the new little bag I bought in Glenwood Springs last weekend (not a "purse", because I hate that word, almost as much as I hate the word "blouse". There's nothing wrong with "shirt" and "bag"). I now hate not having something to write in with me -- ideas for entries and other things come in the weirdest places these days.

I finally selected a small green hardbound book, with blank pages instead of ruled or the grid catastrophe I've been dealing with the last few months. I chose blank paper because I thought it might convince me to draw once in awhile, which probably won't happen. While the writing has been going strong this year, the drawing is down to zero. I only have so much mental energy to go around.

I've always been fairly binary when it comes to writing and drawing. One works, so the other doesn't, which may be why my few attempts at comics have been futile at best. Either I had a great story or idea that the drawings didn't live up to, or interesting artwork with lame, lame, lame-ass writing. The answer for me, obviously, is to find a collaborator.

Now that I've started writing in the new journal (2.5 in the numbering scheme), I'm at odds over what to do with yet-unfinished volume 2. I'm about 75 pages away from the end, and I'm sort of fed up with the physical qualities of the book I'm using. It has grid paper, which is hard to read, it's all soft and floppy, so it's hard to write in without the support of a table underneath, and it doesn't provide the sort of structure for my backpack most journals provide.

So I've been thinking about bagging the last few pages and just starting over in volume 3. I think that this would be cheating, even though nobody cares but me.

Maybe I'll just fill up the rest of the book with long, rambling footnotes. [1] A mystery for future biographers to solve.


I went to the store tonight to obtain some olives, and there was an older lady behind me, buying some gray-covering hair rinse -- Fanci-Full or something like that. Nothing to really notice, but she felt like she had to explain her purchase to me and the cashier.

"Oh, I wasn't intending to buy this -- it just fell into my basket and I felt it would only be right to buy it after that. I don't need it, really."

Talk about denial.


[1] Like Infinite Jest. Which I've actually read, all the way through -- almost more than once, even.

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