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.
Tag: object writing
“Stars”
Stars are incredible. It hardly needs to be said–except it really does need to be said. We don’t live beneath the cosmic blanket of glory that most of our ancestors lived under up until just a few generations ago. We have choked out the light of the stars with what astronomers refer to as “light pollution,” a strange term to be sure. We have become so saturated in the lights of our own world, the combined brightness of millions of tiny little glowing spheres that we have blotted out the beauty of the billions of burning spheres stretched out across the expanding vastness of the universe. If that isn’t a parable for the modern world in general, I don’t know what is. When you look up around here, all you see is a couple twinkling little dots of white or blue up there, maybe Orion or the Big Dipper, the only constellations you managed to recognize or remember from your childhood study of the stars. Or perhaps for some reason you can recognize Casseopeia as a clever tool for snagging the heart of that girl you met one snowy night in the beginning of a chick flick. But that’s hardly relevant. Until you get away from it, you don’t see the vast magnificence. Unless someone with a camera brings it near. Which is good, but even then you don’t quite grasp it the way you would if you were out there standing beneath it, watching the milky river of light split through the middle of the purple night, feeling the chill breeze on your face, not thinking about it, but only the incredible silence and stillness all around you as everything but the sky retreats into the dark black. Now it’s the other way around. When the sun goes, the light in the sky goes too, and all the world below retreats into its cozy lightbulb brightness, its incandescent decadence. Or its fluorescent decadence, and besides that, the strobe lights and flashing neon of the night bars and the clubs darkening the world with the brightness of their lights, using light not as a pointer to joy and heat and wonder and truth, but as a tool to manipulate the brain’s natural hunger for illumination–the brain and the heart’s hunger–as a snare for the soul, woman Folly lighting up her glowing Vegas display and crying out for all the simple to turn in here and taste just how sweet stolen water really is, how good it feels to let your streams be scattered in the street, and take your fill of so-called love till the morning. And outside, the stars from their courses still cry out and seek to fight this outcry against them, still shining bright enough….