You may want to write this down

Writers carry a notebook with them. It’s their twitch stream.

There’s a profound pity in the stupefaction that is staring at the assemblage of letters, which—when you wrote them in a burst of epiphanic succor—meant so much to you but when read a week later makes you go, what could mundane cucumber cock even mean?

For a long-ass time, I have never really carried around a notebook—(I tried because I usually don’t say no to anything uppity)—partly because that would be yet another reminder of why I shouldn’t be writing. Carrying blank pages with you is just morbid.

Also, the record? Piss poor: the number of times anything from the notebook has made it here if we could do some math is ‘infinity minus infinity’.

If you guessed zero, you are dumb.

But I kept trying my way with the notebook.

Because, anymore, I wasn’t so much afraid of the relentless emptiness of the blank page—its reminder of insufficiency, inability, death, and so forth, but (afraid) that I had become so scared of the thing I love—or “loved?”—writing, that I needed a notebook to reassure me. Just the act of carrying one made me believe I was thinking about writing and therefore: writing. I had to fake love in order to stay in love. Shit! I am in a marriage.

Now, the notebook’s there whether I like it or not. I still don’t take it along most time. Because screw that needy bitch. The notebook’s there like a friend I want to tell a secret to. That was the whole point of this, right? This writing. I tell you a secret and you keep it. Sometimes you don’t, and the person you tell it to goes, “That’s creepy.” Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.

Somewhere along the way, I began to believe the best way to write is to chain yourself to the chair. Because masochism’s the secret that has been passed down to writers. “So, when are you going to have a kid?”

As with many things, the notebook can become another chain you carry along with you everywhere you go. Art, if taken too seriously, can make you go about in a circle and before you know it, a spiral. It’s why writer’s block feels like falling into an abyss. Art’s about finding the center, not being it.

Here’s one secret I tell my notebook often: Mundane cucumber cock.

No.

Hear, hear:

This is so beautiful I don’t even have the need to write about it.

Maybe that’s what makes it beautiful. The nullness of yourself meeting the fullness of existence. The freedom of yourself meeting the captivity of devotion.

The notebook meeting the fire.