Writing feels good.

Last year, I attempted the whole NaNoWriMo thing and fell short.  Which is to say that I ran out of steam and quit.  I mean, I did have a job and a seven-month old.  So I didn’t feel badly about it.  Mrs. P suggested we enter the writing contest (fiction) at our local alternative weekly paper this month.  Good motivation to write.

I hadn’t thought about fiction since last year, and I read a short story I thought of working on for this endeavor.  It was written in pencil in a book.  Turns out that it’s way too dirty.  Also, well, I only got through about 5,000 words of it before I realized I could never cut it down to the contest’s 2,500 word limit.  That one might have to get submitted to Playboy or something.  Damn.

So I popped out 1,000 words of a new short story tonight in a half hour on a cup of tea with milk and honey.  (My throat hurts.)  Parts of it made me laugh out loud.  I mean, I sometimes laugh hard at things that aren’t funny.  But maybe this is funny.  I don’t know.  I have to finish it tomorrow or early on Friday and find out.

But it feels damned good to be writing again.  And then I found a pen I’d been looking for.

Charlotte will find hundreds by then.

If not more.  This is a great article not just about the act of keeping a paper notebook, but also of that notebook which has been kept.  I’m running through one Field Notes notebook every 7-14 days.  Not to mention my stash of other notebooks, even from the brand of former liars.

Charlotte has some Field Notes I got her for Christmas, I mean, that Santa (wink wink) got her for Christmas.

Mine are filling with the myriad new words she says everyday now.  Sometimes I am surprised at how easily they come.

On displaying of The Flag on 9/11.

Article first published as On Displaying of The Flag on 9/11/2011 on Blogcritics.
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I received an email from a family member calling one and all to display an American flag on 9/11 this year. On the face of it, I think that’s a nice idea. For all my impertinence about my country and its place in the world, I did something somewhat strange for a reasonably liberal civilian shortly after we moved into our new apartment this summer. The American flag out front was in piss-poor condition. It was a disgrace. So I set about to replace it. My father picked one up for me (and made in the USA to boot), and I replaced it.

The old one is folded and sits on my mantel until the next time I go camping, at which time I will set the flag aflame, salute it, and that’s that. My wife teases that it looks like a memorial, sitting in a sort of place on honor in our living room.

I say “somewhat strange” because more than one person acted surprised that I should give a shit about the condition of our nation’s flag at all, let alone on a building I don’t own but instead pay kind of a lot to live in (well, I don’t pay it…). I mean, left-leaning people can’t be patriotic, right?

I remember doing something similar to what a lot of people did after 9/11/2001. I hung a flag from the balcony of my apartment just outside Boston. (Of course, I hung it correctly.) Some Boston-based newspaper printed a huge flag for people to hang that week, and there was one pasted to the token booth at the North Quincy T station. Flags were everywhere.

And the email I received points that out. Just after 3.000 people were murdered (or killed in an act of “war” – your pick), we all had flags on display. For some people, it might have been the way the wind was blowing. I suppose it could have been a solidarity thing, too. For myself, this was largely the case, but it was also partly a “fuck you” to all enemies, foreign and domestic, as they say. My own flag was draped not just in sorrow, but in anger.

So when my father, a career military man who served his country for three decades, was visiting me in Massachusetts and received a call in October 2001 that we were bombing targets in Afghanistan, I had a flash of, “Yeah, you bastards! How do you like them B-52s?!” Along with such a paroxysm of vengeful glee came my horror that this wasn’t over, that the list of 3,000 dead was no quorum, but was instead only the beginning.

Finally, the email in question addresses the fact that the flags that peppered the urban, suburban and rural American landscape immediately following 09/11/2001 are all but gone. This is true. Sure, some flags probably just fell apart and never got replaced. Some flags came down as a trend died, too. My own flag disappeared in March 2003, when we launched a pointless war on Iraq. I quietly walked out into a cold and gray day in Quincy and took my flag inside. I folded it properly and put it away.

I think that we might have something similar this 09/11. We’ll all put our flags out. Wal-mart will have a sale on Chinese-made American flags. They’ll go up everywhere, and there will be those of us who chide our fellow citizens whose homes, cars, workspaces and bodies are not rocking the red, white and blue. We’ll all display our flags until our leaders get us into something else foolish and dishonorable. I remember that the Boy Scouts of American stopped putting Bill Clinton’s signature on the gold card that Eagle Scouts receive to carry after the whole hummer in the oval office thing.

I’ll bet that after the November 2012 election, a lot of flags come down. On both sides of the aisle.

Wrote tonight.

I mean, like something to try to get published.  Charlotte woke me up twice last night.  And, sleepless, I wrote down some notes with the help of my little reading light.

But, I’m agreeing with Hemingway.  I don’t like to talk about what I’m working on.  (I’m not comparing myself to Papa, for fuck’s sake.)

Let me get it rejected.  Then.  Then we can talk about it.

Of course, that’s if there’s a world tomorrow.  First, an earthquake.  Now a hurricane.  Wow.

I feel like I did something wrong.

I love Field Notes, and I want to write about them more.


I keep meaning to write something awesome and meaningful about Field Notes, after waxing sexual about Moleskines for so long. But I’m too busy filling them up. And, well, I think I poured my heart out a bit in my reviews on PR on the notebook and the pencil. The good folks at FN did link to them, though. I want to give them something awesome to link to again. But I don’t know where to start, damn it. Or where to begin.

Why I don’t really use Moleskines anymore.


Mind you, I’d been using them almost exclusively for nearly 8 (EIGHT!) freakin years.  That’s a lot of notebooks!

It started two years ago, when I got tired of searching for the perfect pen for Moleskines.  I say “for Moleskines” because that thin and crappy paper worked best with bad ballpoints.  As Stephanie from Biffy Beans puts it, it’s “Like trying to write on dead leaves” sometimes.  Nice and inky ballpoints would transfer to the other page when I wrote on the back.  Same for pencil.  Forget anything really and truly inky.  But, I realized that, for better or worse, I really liked them.  And that was that.

Well, it actually started a few years before that, when I wished that Moleskines were a little greener.  There were no green moleskine (small m) books back then, not that I could find.  Not like now.

Anyway, the pen search was annoying.  I know I’m not alone, either, and on blogs and Flickr and Facebook, people searched for something that would work in these over-priced books with lies on the covers.  Then, this summer, I lost my shit a little one day over my BRAND WHOREDOM.  I recovered, and the company that owns Moleskine, meanwhile, promised greener cover materials.

Yeah, not only are they not made of recycled paper, and not only are they kinda made in China, kinda made in Italy, kinda taken on a whole trip around the world before you pay too much for them (must be where that get all that “nomad” crap from).  They are also covered in freakin PVC.  People who were laser-engraving these things had to stop because burning PVC creates dangerous fumes.

WARNING : DO NOT LASER ENGRAVE MOLESKINES WITHOUT THE PROPER FILTRATION SYSTEM. BURNING THEM CREATES HIGHLY TOXIC GASES INCLUDING PHOSGENE AND CHLORINE GAS. THE HYDROCHLORIC ACID PRODUCED WILL CORRODE EVERYTHING IT CONTACTS.

PVC can make fire-fighters sick when it’s used in building materials and burns.  One of my favorite people in the world is a fire-fighter.  I feel like I shouldn’t contribute to the PVC market, especially when I can easily just, you know, not do it.  Most companies are taking it out of their products.  Many did a long time ago.  Again, someone from the company that makes Moleskine products promised greener cover materials in August in a comment to this post.  Last August.  No word on that.  That only that, but they won’t publish even the most innocent “hey, got a date on them there covers?” comment on that post.  I’m going to pass on talking about how they destroyed one of the coolest blogs on the internet by just making Moleskinerie a badly-written ad.  But censoring comments from people who leave a real email address and URL and who have had previously-published comments is just bullshit.

Also.  Yes.  The last three Moleskines I bought had to be replaced by the company.  They actually only replaced two.  One had every page ripped, and another had a BUG in the paper.  Yes, a dead bug.  They sent one to replace them.  Thanks.  Then they wrapped one of those fancy “passions” journals so badly in its unnecessary plastic that the pages barely opened from the bend-job they got on the book’s trip around the world and to my doorstep.  After three emails and at least six weeks, they replaced that.  It smelled like, as someone else put it, jet fuel also.  It sits and is not used near food.

I felt like a jack-ass already, not only for how many of those damned things I’d bought and filled, but for how many I caused other people to buy.  And how many I gave as gifts.  Etc.

Then, this summer/fall, I scored some better books and haven’t looked back since.  I can use whatever pens I want to.  Some of them are made of green materials, using green processes.  None of them have lies printed all over them and never have.  And, playing to my own weakness, none of them are prone to idolatry or fetishization from me — that I can tell.  Except Field Notes, but I, frankly, just write and draw in them, beat the shit out of them, and start a new one when it’s full.  I haven’t gotten batty about them.  Not yet.  If I do, I’ll quit using them, no matter how nice the paper is.

(This thing is FULL of Moleskines.)

But this made me poop in my own cereal.  Not only is Moleskine now just a brand for over-priced Notebooks.  It’s a brand for all kinds of shyte.  Check it out:

“Writing, Travelling and Reading. The new Moleskine collections include bags, pencils, pens, reading glasses, computer cases, a rechargeable reading light and an e-reader stand. A series of accessories, clip-ons and holders are perfectly compatible with the notebooks, ensuring the greatest range of uses and thus forming the ideal kit for the modern-day nomad. Designed by Giulio Iacchetti, the new collections are bound to the Moleskine’s very make-up in their functional and aesthetic traits: the elastic band, the rounded corners, the black color, the simple design.”

Moleskines are, officially, ruined for me.  I remember when they were actually made well (I don’t care what the company says, the quality has gone to hell in the last 2-3 years, with some exceptions like my 2009 planner), when they were still kind of esoteric and hard to find, when they felt special and practical — when a Moleskine was a notebook, not an over-branded pack of sticky-notes.

And, yet.  Still.  I totally want The Little Prince edition.  And, jeepers.  I find myself drawn to them sometimes.  I can’t say why. I readily admit that a large part of why Moleskines were such an issue for me relates to my own personality. They became like a woman who was really bad for me, but whom I really liked to involve myself with. In the stationery department, I mean.

Before you’re tempted to send pro-Moleskine hatemail, read the post title again.  No one’s taking away your planet-killing notebooks.  Just your money.

No no lighten up; more positive; or, less negative!

Despite what usually appears on this blog, I think I’m pretty easy-going.  Maybe.  A little.  I usually write when I’m angry, sad, etc.  Like a freakin teenager.  What does it say about a person if negative emotions/experiences inspire him or her?  Is that the worst kind of pessimist?  I wouldn’t say that, “I’m only happy when it rains,” or anything like that.  But I don’t tend to want to write or create when I’m happy.

Maybe I seldom take a step back to want to create anything when I’m happy?  Maybe I am too full of my own life then?  Maybe I want to create when I’m sad or angry to avoid dealing with it?  To make some life out of it?  My dissertation topic was the usefulness of hate.  I spent a year exploring whether hate could be a useful activity and whether it is possible to use hate for “positive” (Pragmatically speaking) purposes.  (The answer to both was YES.)  It is twisted, realistic, wise, visionary or crazy to find usefulness in hate?

[Maybe I don't have any discipline, too.  That might be one of my worst qualities as a  person.]

I’m making an effort to be more “positive.”  I’m always positive on the pencil blog, usually was on the bike blog, even  used to be when I first started this blog in spring 2004 and imagined myself to be some kind of cuddly sojourner in the Heartland.

In my defense, I think the urge to create in times of turmoil could even be some perverted attempt to right a wrong in the world or to make something positive out of something negative.  Too bad my angry writing is just angry and probably makes the world worse, if it does anything at all.  When my wife (then girlfriend) and I lived a few hundred miles apart for two years during college, I couldn’t keep a journal because I tended to wallow in self-pity and a depression that only my closest friends seemed to notice.

Now, notebooks are where I write somewhat creatively.  My journal is largely (though not entirely) for record-keeping.  My sleep-deprived brain lately can’t remember things.  In the case that this is permanent (I’m not getting younger), I write down important events that I might want to remember.  I can get obsessive about this, however.  But that’s another issue I have that I attempt to hide from most people: how incredibly compulsive I am.

But that’s another weakness.

Writing supplies?

I should include a photo with this (and borrow Mrs. P’s camera).  But why, oh, why, are there retailers/shops that specialize in art supplies, but not writing supplies? Or, maybe there are, and they are for offices.  But I mean writing!  I realize that a lot of creative writing (especially professionally) has gone digital.  But, if I’m correct, so has professional “art.”

Dropping out?

I wonder if it might be good for me to drop out of all this internet/cyber crap.  Digital cameras, Facebook, blogs, Flickr.  I spend a lot of time putting [carefully selected parts of] my life on display and checking out other people’s.  I don’t think this is healthy for me as a father struggling to live in the proverbial moment.

Then again, this could be brought on by my frustration over having to send my relatively expensive camera to Canon again, after they got crap under my lens last time they repaired it.  And the sudden jolt when I realized that I won’t have my camera Friday when my old friend comes to town — as if it didn’t happen if I don’t record it all as a JPG.

I sent paper cards to a few folks recently, folks to whom I used to write regularly.  And it felt great.  I miss spending time reading books and writing, rather than reading about pens and authors’ silly personal secrets on the web.  I used to write more than I read about pens and Moleskines, and this is no longer anywhere near the case.

I was going to start a serious, full-time dad blog latter this summer.  Now, I don’t know.

It feels like the whole world is online, though, and you miss everything if you’re not.  But then again, what are we really missing?

I’m spending too much time consuming and not enough time creating.

I need to write more.

Not blogging; not journaling.  Writing.  There was a time in my life when it was all I wanted to do and all I thought I was good at.  Then I met other “writers” at college, started dating a writer, majored in philosophy, and that was that.  That was thirteen years ago.

I never even tried.  Not really.

The bizarre urge to document everything.


Before Charlotte was born, we bought her a new Moleskine (sized A4) for a first-year journal, and I bought a new camera with the cash I was planning on buying an acoustic bass with. My better half is a talented historian, and I’m a little obsessive and compulsive. We planned on recording everything. Everything.

I didn’t mean to, but I’ve found myself watching important moments through my camera’s LCD screen, and I’m so behind in journaling (and I haven’t cracked Charlotte’s volume open) that I can’t stand to sit down and begin to write anything at all. Today, I noticed a nice red stuck pixel in the middle of my camera’s pictures. Great. I know that bad pixels are a fact of digital photography, but a red one right in the middle is disconcerting. I spent the night trying out CHDK, but their website and download pages have been down all night. And the firmware version is conflicting with what it’s supposed to be. Canon said to send it back to them. Okay, that’s like $15-$20 in shipping and a week or two (or three) without my camera.

In itself, that’s not the end of the world. I could do something scummy, like buy my camera over again and return the one I have now, since my return period is over. Aside from being scummy, I’m sentimental, and I don’t want to do that. This camera took Charlotte’s first picture ever. But I find myself hoping that she doesn’t do anything too memorable in the meantime. And this is stupid.

For another thing, if it were me, I’d rather hear the story from my parents than see the photos. My parents took tons and tons of photos of their boys as children. But my own memory and hearing my parents tell me things that I don’t remember serve me better for my nostalgic needs than photo albums. In fact, there are some I’ve probably never even bothered to look through.

I’ve developed a strange “I’m getting older” and “important things are happening now” penchant for writing everything down and recording everything (that sounds like it’s own blog post) over the last few years. I worked all day and spent half the time Charlotte was awake messing with my camera like her childhood depended on it. But worrying more about some photos and posting them on Facebook seems like a waste of energy to me these days.

But, you know. Tell me that.

Gumption.


I was at a community meeting with a co-worker last month, in a church basement.  Some funny little man mentioned the word “gumption.”  I wrote said word on my meeting agenda, and my co-worker (who’s a community artist and illustrator) drew this sketch of a man puking.  So I wrote a caption:

gumption.  (noun): The state of puking out one’s very soul, eg., “She sold her soul but then got the gumption and had to welch on the deal.”

(Larger image here.)
(More from artist Quentin Gibeau here.)

They don’t just teach writing in school.

Revising my dissertation, I wonder if working in higher education/community engagement, outside of an academic discipline, hasn’t been better for my prose writing? I have to write for university administrators, nonprofit and community partners regularly, not to mention sometimes writing in order to convince people to do something they don’t really want to do. There’s a lot of pomp and false wit in the dissertation that I would never put into something for other people to read on paper like that these days.  Of course, blogging is full of pomp, almost necessarily so, so you probably haven’t noticed, as I haven’t until this morning. :)

Anatomy of Restlessness.

anatrest0208.jpg
I am finishing up Bruce Chatwin‘s Anatomy of Restlessness. Being jobless and stuck in my apartment most days while Mrs. P is at work, I found this book both thrilling and depressing. I am a big Chatwin fan, but I especially enjoyed this posthumous publication because of the honesty of a few of the pieces, such as “I Always Wanted To Go To Patagonia” and a letter wherein he spells out the plan for his great book on nomadism/restlessness that never got written. I mean, Chatwin was a little…pretentious at times, such as when, in The Songlines, he spelled out how awesome his black notebooks were in such detail that an Italian company was able to reproduce them ten years later. I mean, I confess an addiction of sorts to those little treasures, so I think this is a good thing. But in an interview, maybe. In the main text? Pretentious? Or maybe brave? A little soul-baring? Chatwin says that the man he was talking to looked at him, when Chatwin told him about his precious notebooks, as if he had never heard anything more pretentious. Did that happen, or did old Bruce imagine that in some kind of self-consciousness?

Maybe even when he is fictionalizing his “stories” he was still honest to some degree, more so than one would believe when I started writing this post. Maybe he was a complete liar. I don’t know. Either way, you should still definitely check out this book. Or anything else by Chatwin you can get your hands on. I found this book, first edition, sitting on a stack when I walked into Normals one day this fall, after looking for that book for a long time. I exclaimed out-loud, “I’ve been looking for this! It’s like it was here just for me.”

But now I am restless. Very. When I read the first essay last week, I went shopping when I was pretty sick (and got sicker) because I could not stand the idea of staying home all day after reading something like that. Is that sad? I have finally gotten around to filling in a travel journal from our research trips in fall 2006. They were a bit of a pain at the time, when I was trying to get a dissertation written. But now I wish I could go back to New Haven for another chilly Friday morning wishing I brought something other than sandals. Or to New York for a thunderstorm on Broadway, ducking into the largest Barnes and Noble I have ever seen. Or to Boston, within a mile of where I lived for two years, remembering all things I loved and hated about that place. Hours at my favorite cafe’ there.

For now, I have to settle for books and other people’s experiences. And, of course, remembering my own.

[Larger images here.]