I open the notebook and the first blank page stares out at me, issuing a dare. Rationally, I know that in time this book will be full of my scribblings and crossings. But right now I have a superstitious fear about writing anything in it. The first sentence will set the tone, decide whether this is to be a good or a bad book.

The notebook is all potential. I might make some character sketches for my novel, perhaps prove the conjecture that's been eating at me these last few years. Everything is possible, at least until that defining instant when I set pen to paper.

A decision will only speed me to the book's final closing. So for the moment I sit and think, imagining what might be written, not daring to write.

I bought myself a new notebook today, college ruled and pages to be filled. I know they will be filled, to make room in my head for more ideas. I know there will be another notebook after this one, another gel pen, more pages scribbled and grubby and black-smudgy, rolling smoothly and scrawling and filling pages with my consciousness. I know there will be more, because I think and that’s that.

Blank pages can do a lot to a tired and cluttered mind. A new notebook is a cleaner place to throw your insistent and haphazard trash. A place where it could possibly be more beautiful, because full journals get too ugly, with time. Your mind will always mislead you, deceive you, into believing that this new notebook in a new whizbang colour with it's sweet scent and it's virgin pages, can always remain pure - like a lady, it will exhibit all the restraint and the subtlety and the delicate nuances between dream and reality that you know a quaint little utopian book, your book, should possess.

You're wrong: but it doesn't matter, because blank pages, hypnotic, swirling, with all that could be (but probably won't).. are far too mindnumbing, far too mesmerising to ever doubt. They're innocent, you think. They can't ever tell a lie.

But they can, damnit. Like the way Marcia Brady shall eventually become a slut. The way Holden Caulfield ended up institutionalised. The way the adult world played with Alice's mind and forced her to play illogical adult games, the way she was disillusioned when her dreamy garden was in fact, not at all dreamy, but cruel and hallucinatory and creepy, in some cultures.

But it's fine, because pristine notebooks are like little literary nymphets, little textual Lolitas; they're seductive, and utterly unaware of it.

So once my mind became a wreck again, and sluggish and stagnant, I strolled up to the store. I spent precious time selecting the most appropriate notebook, and to accompany it, a nifty new pen. I took it to the park, and even had a glass of watermelon vodka to 'celebrate'. I guess I flirted with it for a while; I wasn't sure exactly how to approach it at first, you never are. No blank page is ever the same as another. I touched it lightly and inhaled its breezy, faint fragrances, and eventually, finally, I began to write. It wasn't as ideal as I should have made it, and I felt guilty for destroying something so untouched.

But of course, I will keep on writing and writing in hopes to remedy that, but when I inevitably become too frustrated.. I shall simply buy myself a new lovely little notebook, to ruin and corrupt.

Words

Are but random scribbling

in the life of the soul.

or perhaps the soul of the life.

Either.

Neither. Better put - a cobweb cast both into and against the dark.

keeping the different path, the not awake at bay

embracing what accepts the gentle drag.

Sentences - strung together webs of filigree

common thought entwines with common thought

what is

is.

Steel bends, lumber splinters, brick cracks

all will be ruin in time.

thoughts

turned to words

touch the stars -

what is not

does not.

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