The Story of the Notebooks

or, "How I Killed Myself, Which I Sometimes Regret"

I can stop being frustrated if I stop thinking. Okay. What is the big deal about thinking, anyway? It is highly overrated. Go with the flow. Stay with the status quo. Stick to the norm. This is how to get along. I tried it. It works wonders, except it is hard to do.

Here is the story of how I killed myself, which I sometimes regret.

Once there was a young boy whom everyone called "high-strung." This lad was very intelligent and while other boys were learning to play catch and write longhand, he was skipping a grade and not bothering to learn these mundane things. Some of the things he learned you may find out in a story with a disclaimer about the embarrassing nature of the content (I seldom, if ever, plan to do that. You know I have great potential to be embarrassing and only my word, which I assure you is true, to say that I don’t do it on purpose. This is the blog where you meet the real me, and I apologize for the disappointment.) As he grew and his peers knew the stats of various ball players, he knew the distances between all the planets. While they were wasting time running around and playing outside, he would be in the house reading a book. Any book he could get his hands on, and if it was forbidden, all the better. Sometimes he would go and play and during his summers he would have no choice for his parents sent him off to his grandparents and uncles so he wouldn’t be such a bookworm.

Alas, for you can take the bookworm out of the library, but you can’t take the library out of the bookworm. His absence from his beloved books only made him desire intellectual stimulation that much the more. He had other sorts of stimulation, but nothing to busy his mind. This is how he developed an extraordinary imagination and would make up stories to go with the games they played.

When did he first notice music? How did he come to realize that you could put words together to express the things you imagined in a way that others could imagine the same thing or almost the same thing? Knowing nothing of how music was made, he did see that even when the music wasn’t there, the words made a kind of music on their own.

Around eleven or twelve he decided that he could write words that would make music. Someone could add the real music later, but he could write the words. He had discovered books of poetry at the library and thought some was nice or funny or interesting but just as much was crap. He would probably wind up writing some of all of it. So he got a notebook and started.

He would daydream about people buying books of his poems and quoting them in the streets and begging him to write more and write stories and movies and TV shows.

He was always a strange boy. One day he did one of those "draw Sparky" contests and sent it in. A representative from the art school came and told his parents they would like to enroll him. But, they were just folk and really didn’t have money for that. Oh, it would be nice, but we really can’t. He didn’t care, it felt good to know someone was interested in him already. After the man left, he decided to bring his notebook down and show one of his poems to his father.

The dad laughed and said it was good but the boy didn’t know how to take that. Why did he laugh and say it was good at the same time? His father didn’t know what to make of the strange, high-strung boy. The boy kept his notebooks to himself after that.

He found school boring and teachers boring and most people his age boring. He didn’t care about what they wanted him to learn, he had other things he wanted to know about. Why was he like he was? Why was he shunned and mocked and picked on? Why did he feel better when he would write about it? Why did he never want to show what he wrote to anyone? He did show a few things to his best friend.

The English teachers interested him. He became fond of the woman in the tenth grade who gave him a project. Well, not just him, of course, but all of the class; it just seemed to him that it was his specific assignment. She wanted them to keep a journal and at the same time she was teaching about poetry! Sonnets, Iambic Pentameter, anapests, couplets, ballads, lyric, rhyme scheme; so much to learn, so interesting that he had to know more. It was the only class assignment he did well on in high school. He loved it and he loved and hated the way the teacher would critique his work. What difference if the meter was off? But she knew he loved this.

And all the time he filled up more notebooks. Even after he "got religion."

High school finally ended and he got a job and a couple of weird friends and to the shock of everyone, he got married.

And all the time he filled up notebooks, recording the good and bad. Sometimes very good, sometimes very bad.

By the time he was in his thirties he had quite a collection. He had managed to fill as many notebooks as the number of his age. Oh, he never actually had the nerve to send something off and of course he still could not show the deepest, darkest pieces to anyone, but he had them. Everything he had ever thought and written down in what, twenty, thirty, forty notebooks?

This story is not intended to relate all of the events of the lad’s life. It is not a complete history.

The day came when he was falsely accused of a wretched crime of betrayal he never committed. He didn’t even know how to commit or that it was possible for him. How dare she? There was not even the smallest amount of proof. Nothing. Yet the burden of proof was upon him! Oh what a wretched fool, to try in vain to prove he hadn’t done this. Later on he would learn to understand how the human brain will accuse someone else of the same thing it has done, but he did not know anything about that then.

At the time he only knew he was hurt, but what to do? What to do to make his heart stop hurting?

His original plan was to speed up on the ramp on the interstate to a high rate of speed and go flying. What great fun. But, what if it didn’t work? What if he only got mangled? What if he survived?

The next idea had greater merit. He went along on his Boy Scout troop’s campout, driving at night in the dead of winter along narrow mountain paths. I would let them get their camp set up, discover something important to go back to town for and go flying down the mountains. An icy bridge at a high rate of speed with no witnesses was perfect. Except that the other leaders thought that such a trip would be too dangerous to take alone and refused to allow it.

He was so depressed and his heart was so empty and filled with such blackness that he only wanted to kill himself but he was too cowardly and he knew that if he did that he would screw up other lives. He recalled so many instances, good and bad, in his own life that were influenced by the presence of others, who, had they not been there, especially if they had killed themselves, he shuddered to think how much more screwed up his life and mind would be.

That was when he hit upon his plan. When he was all alone he lit a fire in the barbecue grill and went and got the box that contained all of his notebooks. Every folder with every loose sheet of paper with every drawing would go first. His earliest attempts at drawing Sparky and every other loose sheet, then, sheet by spiral-bound sheet he began with the first song he ever attempted. All the way down through the years. From the black holes of depression to the bright suns of religious brilliance, to the journal his English teacher had made him do, a page at a time into the fire.

He swore with a vow and an oath that day that he would never, ever, write again.

Then he was gone. Burnt up. The spiral wire skeletons of notebooks (he had burned the covers, too) all that was left. And he was dead. He was deader and colder now than any bullet could have ever made him. He had succeeded in destroying himself.

** Pt II **

So, why is anyone reading anything I have written? Why are there poems and stories and essays and commentaries and a veritable plethora of other things written, not out of necessity, but creativity? Did you take your vow or oath or whatever so lightly?

*heavy sigh* When I worked at a big corporation I wound up making friends with this girl who had been married about twelve – fourteen years and had known her husband for seventeen.

Before you begin to shake your head or point your finger and say, "Aha! Thou art the man!" I must say you are wrong. I am not as superficial and hollow as all that. Many people would say I had right to be that superficial and hollow and more. I will digress here for a moment. I must explain some things about this before I continue the narrative about the notebooks and how I came back to writing. As a child I found myself exposed to a situation that caused me to make a rule, even as young as, Oh I don’t recall, maybe eight or so, a rule about what I would do if I were ever to get married. The rule, I suppose you could call it a conviction, even in me, was that if I ever did get married, that I would not fool around unless there was something available that was extraordinarily beyond what I had and that I would not ever try to look for such trouble. If "fooling around" meant sex that would not be any different from what I was getting, what would be the point (Such a thought at eight years old? Well, as you get to know more about this lad you will see that it was not as unusual as you would think).

This is a strange rule for an eight year old, but remember, he is a strange child. It seemed to me that if you could get something at home, why go out somewhere else and get the same thing and trouble? Why bother? It has served me well. Then, another, equal part of the rule was that if I did happen to find better sex, there would have to be a better emotional attachment as well. Even when I was going through the hellish depression that followed my first betrayal, the thought of using a twenty dollar hooker as revenge never occurred to me. The subject of hookers and strippers (I have never been in that sort of a club, either, as strange as that may seem) will be such a vast digression that I will need to make it a topic by itself. My views of such things are atypical there as well.

Returning to this rule, am I going to claim to be pure-in-heart and that I have never had a vile or lustful thought? Ha-ha! See, here is a fundamental, I guess you could call it a doubt that I have always nursed. Is the thought alone a sin? If he would never actually DO the thing, but has thought about it how is he guilty? Or, rather, of what is he guilty? So many times during the day he sees attractive females and thinks, "wow!" but doesn’t actually take any action, what has he done? Seeing the half-naked girls of summer stir warm feelings within, but no action, so what? I think, in fact, that the argument can be made that if it makes him a little friskier and more amorous, this could turn out to be a good thing. Besides, even if nice-looking was guaranteed to equal better sex, which it by no means does, there is the emotional part of the rule. So, while on a primal level there is a stirring which I think happens to most men, there is an intellectual, emotional part of the equation that is untouched and unmoved.

The rule is an integral part of the story, lest I fear you would jump to conclusions before the story is even told.

This girl and her husband had been childhood sweethearts and best friends. He was in the Army and they had never had any problems until he got a recruiting job here. One day she tearfully confided to me that she thought he had been cheating on her and she didn’t know who she could talk to or trust or what to do next. I felt an intensity of emotion that is difficult to explain. Tears ran down my face, which I quickly wiped away and which obviously surprised her. I calmed myself and told her that I had had such an experience but that I also knew how it felt to be falsely accused. The advice I gave her was to make certain because a false accusation could do more damage than she could know, but if he was, and we both had a gut feeling that he was, my feeling was more intuitive, she "knew," then she should divorce him immediately and even though she might forgive him and stay his friend, she should make a complete break. She took my advice.

This powerful surge of emotions affected me strangely. Things at home had gotten patched up (This false accusation was the first and hardest to deal with because it had hit me unexpectedly) but the flood of emotion (I have seen a flood and think it the right term) was overwhelming to me. The next day I picked up a left-handed notebook at the office supply store and did what I had sworn not to do, I wrote. I journalled and poemed it out of my system and gave her a revised copy of the poem. Then I was fearful of what I had done. I had sworn and vowed not to do that. Besides, how could I explain what was written there? I knew my own innocence but who would believe that I was merely this person’s friend?

I stuck the notebook away. But it had felt so good, even cathartic, to touch the paper with a pen. To try to choose the right word to convey the certain thought. But, having had my notebooks looked into before and their contents taken out of context and used against me (for I also wrote in times past about all manner of things, including fantasies and ideas for stories. At one point I had considered a career as a writer of pornographic novels. The cheap kind that have no socially redeeming whatsoever but serve only to titillate the most prurient of interests. I would have been good at it, too. It only required the most rudimentary of plots based on whichever taste you were targeting and a lot of imaginative adjectives and copious amounts of adverbs and gerunds). Some people cannot, will not, understand that some things are completely fiction, however. Since I wrote it (not everything I wrote was like that, only a very small portion), it must have been true even though it was impossible.

I feared to keep a notebook and feared to take up writing again.

**Pt III**

I apologize to you, faithful reader, that I am not filling in all of the blanks of details and times and setting the scenes as I should. While this part of the story actually has some drama to it, I have to decide how to finish the story based on time constraints. I am trying to tell you the salient points and if something needs clarification later, feel free to ask.

I had decided that the thing to do was to get rid of this notebook also. I really thought that all of my problems would be solved if I just quit writing. I had resolved to do this when I made two new friends at the same time. Two very different people in some ways, very similar in their love of reading. One was at work, the other at church. Both loved Shakespeare, the classics, fine literature, especially Romantic era authors.

The one at work was a complete snot (many people there thought she was a witch with a capital "B" if you follow) until she learned that even though I looked and spoke like an ignorant ape, I was actually more knowledgeable than she was in certain areas and more rounded in my reading. She came around and began to confide in me things about how she felt convinced by a certain tragedy in her life that there was no God. She had a good critical eye and was not afraid to use her sharp tongue if she felt something was stupid or inane. I showed her one of my pieces and she not only praised it, it opened more discussion of Romantic era poets and the masters.

By the time I left that job, she was not a staunch atheist but an interested agnostic and I was better educated and read than before. She admonished me to become an English major, which thing I still may do at some point in time, but that time is not yet.

During this period the first girl, from part II, discovered that her loving sweetheart had gotten one of his seventeen year old recruits pregnant and was in deep trouble.

The girl at church, meanwhile, not only took me into her confidence but convinced me that she was a trustworthy confidante as well. She just liked to talk and liked to read and would recommend books that she liked and would read things I recommended. She also liked my writing, which had now filled a second notebook and was beginning a third. These I kept in a briefcase and rarely took out.

After I left that job the first two friends that I had met, left me. Just completely stopped talking or e-mailing or anything. It was quite bizarre really. I still can’t account for it.

This last, however, was able to maintain confidences of any sort and when I would copy a piece to the computer and print it off, she would return it to me with her remarks and comments on it. I was still struggling with my vow to never write again, but by the time I had filled a third notebook I realized what I had really done in destroying the works that had made up my "self" and of course, now regret it.

One of the only things I did not confide in her about was the second and third baseless accusations. These are not a part of this story, but I will tell you that after the third I realized that I had gained some self-respect I had never had before and made ultimatum concerning having evidence.

I wrote and wrote during this period and announced my intention of being a writer. No one goes into my briefcase or looks into my notebooks and I have used my writing to purpose in patching things up and making nice. These sorts of problems and how I dealt with them do not fit into this story, but, I think, they have passed. I have since announced my intention to be a writer which has been received lukewarmly, except where I have put together pieces that have been designed specifically to help things in my relationship. I have also written things to help me work through some of my own bitterness.

Although it was more than five years ago, no one really has a clue yet that the incident with the notebooks even happened or what had caused it. Sometimes pieces from those notebooks will float through my brain like ghosts, but I cannot recapture or rebuild them.

They are lost forever.