Book

So there it is. I've had it for a couple of weeks now. On my second foray into a Borders, I found it. Like before, there was some choosiness involved. I handled it, ran my fingers across the faux alligator-skin texture. It felt ... acceptable. It wasn't blandly smooth like the others, but it was still reasonably plain. I am a fairly plain person. Dark colors, no patterns if I can help it.

I held it in my hand like a textbook, spine in my palm, fingers curled up the face. I walked around the store with it tucked there, judging the way it came along with me as I looked at books I wasn't planning to buy. (I love books, but I hate owning them. If I read a book once, the chance that I'll go back and read it again is slim since I already know what's going to happen, so the expense seems a little pointless--especially since I can go to the library and get the same experience for free.) I wandered. I liked the way the book felt in my grip. I could see myself taking it along to a park or the beach or on a car ride, pen tucked between its pages, ready for inspiration to strike. It wouldn't weigh me down. It would barely draw attention with its unassuming blackness. Sure, that textured cover might draw the eye, but it wouldn't shout, Look! Look at me! I'm an AUTHOR and I'm WRITING!

Which would be bad. No shouting, please.

Convinced that I had found The One, I bought it and headed out. I was pleased. I had taken that step, admittedly small, toward getting my writer back. But John, you ask, and rightly so, did you then use it?

O, you astute reader.

I did. The picture at right was taken during my son's karate class. This was the test I was waiting for. An hour-plus to kill. Would I once again dive into the puzzling depths of the game Zuma on my phone, or would I go to the car, break out the new journal, and whip out some sort of pithy thoughtflow?

Having the picture right there sort of kills the suspense, doesn't it?

That's me writing the "Bounty" entry. I dropped back into that handwriting groove sitting there in the dojo and scrawled my way through three full pages. The pen scraped beautifully across the page as I fired off line after line in my relatively indecipherable handwriting which, I was once told, "looks like an axe murderer's."

Axe murdering is so gauche. Not my style. But I digress.

It was nice. Even the hand cramp that I predicted would come. Even the way the side of my hand raked across the bottom of the page as I moved through that last line, so into the flow of the thing that I didn't want to stop. It was the feeling of writing, the core visceral act of the thing and I was doing it. A few days later I broke it out again to jot down notes for a music review. I wrote, said the writer, in my book.

I admit that the book has stayed in my bag for a couple of weeks. But my bag's always with me, so my book's always with me and there will be no runaway Muses should they happen by. I'll just take out my black fake leather alligator-skin journal, twenty bucks at Borders, flip it open to a clean white page and trap them right there between the thin grey lines.

Said the writer.