2006-07-05

The NOTEBOOKS

Partially inspired by PK's unearthing of demos and "lost" recordings various and sundry, I started pulling out the notebooks that I diligently kept from my college years up through the mid-to-late-90's.

I almost always had a notebook with me, and the ones from '92 through '96 are particularly...um...insane. I wrote everything down as soon as it came to me. I had absolutely NO internal editor. In many ways, I miss this about myself. Very little gets committed to the page these days, in part because I do so much of my writing on the computer now, but also because I pretty much tell myself that it sucks before I've fully formed even a sentence. Somewhere along the line I did this to myself. Can't quite place when it happened.

I did much of my writing in a scary, sort of upended gothic kind of script (I have to give myself a break here; I was in my early-to-mid-twenties and still thought it was cool to eschew things like capitalization). Not surprisingly, much of what's in these notebooks involve being drunk a lot and maybe struggling a little too hard to find deeper meaning in situations that didn't merit that kind of scrutiny. Oh, and guys. Not quite boys, not quite men. Guys.

my construction paper mailbox is empty and these chalky hearts tell me nothing about anything i need to know like where are you on a day like this and why tell me to call when you won't answer your phone? it's all stupid shit and i buy it by the pound.

God. The PATHOS. I very distinctly remember writing these things and FEELING very intensely about it all. Oh, yes. Intensity was KEY. Intensity, and line breaks which made NO fucking sense.

in case you were wondering,
i played house with you
when i couldn't sleep
it was nice in theory
and we had cool furniture
but i could never quite
imagine
telling you about
the things that keep me alive -
my words,
the words of others that
i wish could be mine,
how they fit together and
how some people make money
by getting them into a lucrative
arrangement.
i couldn't tell you
because it all became static...
and i knew that yours
was only
the most polite of interests
and well fuck why bother?

"rebound," you swore,
was not in your vocabulary.
"confrontation"
isn't
either.

All I can say is thank Christ there was no such thing as myspace, or diaryland, when I was 24 years old. Although I would've at least had the option of a "delete" button.

lisamcc at 11:19 p.m.

2 comments so far
Danielle
2006-07-06 07:25:47
Ha! I love it. There's an event in NYC (I think it runs monthly) called "Cringe" where a bunch of people converge at a bar and read from their adolescent diaries and journals. Hilarious.
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Lisa
2006-07-06 07:58:49
The problem is that with this stuff, I was well past adolescence. Comparatively speaking, the high school diaries are practically Faulkner.
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