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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 never even tried.  Not really.

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.  (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.)