“Notebooks”

Used to be notebooks were those large, flat things with colored covers and cheap, thin cardboard backing that fell apart after you used it too much. The wire spine held the pages together, usually, unless the notebook was really cheap, or for some reason they were the bad part of the batch, I don’t know, maybe they didn’t pass quality control or something. Then their pages would quickly disintegrate and fall out of the spiral, leaving behind little dandruff-y flakes of torn paper stuck in the spiral, like the long strands of clumped dust that collects in vacuum cleaners. You could pull those out and wad them up into tiny little wads and probably do something with them, but they just ended up littering the table or other workplace, perhaps one of the long dark brown tables at the Hosanna lunch room, which perpetually smelled of coffee and something someone microwaved a while ago, and now is getting stuck in your nostrils with a violent hostility, making you wish it wasn’t so cold outside, so you could go out and sit on the porch where all you smelled was fresh air. But anyhow, sometimes there were those spiral notebooks that had pages that were too aggressively perforated, and the slightest pull could have the pages falling out all over the places. Or there was the other extreme, where the pages weren’t perforated well enough, and your attempts to pull the page out with a nice, neat edge to it were thwarted about halfway down the page, when the part of the page that was entwined with the metal spiral gave way and came loose, and you held in your hand a page with a straight edge until halfway down, it started springing a vista of skylines like New York City or Arches National Park. Sometimes the blue lines on the paper were watery, sometimes they were crisp and dark, sometimes the red line there sharp as a laser, sometimes nowhere to be seen. I’ve used many of these kinds of notebooks throughout the years, from the purple one that I wrote about last year, which took into its pages my Myst-ic maps, to the spiral fat book that Grandma gave me a few years ago for the big therapy endeavor.