. . . is buy a cheap notebook and write an obsessively perverse erotic thriller by hand.
Or, you know, a fictional mecha "rat patrol" after action report. Or maybe it's entirely non-fictional.
Or a long, profane monologue about the nuances of grinding your molars down into the gum meats due to stress or anger or cocaine or curiosity or joy or all of those things or maybe you don't even know why. Or maybe you know why . . . and you're just super into crafting a brand new rhetorical construct to instantiate a preferred cause of such terrible effects-you can make it your prerogative all night long, if you want to!
I wrote a "lost episode" of Miami Genesis Evicegelion just because it felt good.
My point . . . is that notebooks and pens and pencils are relatively cheap. You can use these cheap things to take notes for some boring class . . . and you can use them to have some wholesome and/or unwholesome fun. Why not choose the fun every now and again?
Remember, these methods and materials are totally offline. You don't have to share them with anyone or anything. They stay offline until you make an effort to alter that state.
And I'm not offering this up as some sort of Protestant Work Ethic cat o' nine tails to flagellate yourself with, or as a way to stay on top of your Nanowrimo goals or what have you.
This isn't even journaling . . . unless you want it to be. You can make it that, if you want.
What I'm into . . . is doing something . . . that may or may not be allowed . . . that has questionable value in terms of productivity . . . and that only I get to fully enjoy . . . because I choose to do something for myself and not the grind.
An indulgence, perhaps . . . but that's one kind of fun you can have if you want to have that kind of fun.
And the notebook has whatever lifespan you decide. You can rip it up, put it in a shredder, feed it to your dog, eat it yourself if you're a freak for that paper flavor-
Yes, you can burn it. I've burned some of my notebooks. It was very dramatic. Just don't fuck with fire if you're in a drought zone, we don't need anymore regional megafires, okay?
My preference is for a black, plasticky college ruled notebook-and not the spiral-bound kind-I hate those spirals, I don't go near 'em!-of seventy to a hundred pages in length.
But that's just me.
You can buy whatever kind of notebook suits you. Any color. Wide ruled. College ruled. They got dot journals. And grid paper. Hexagons for the armchair generals-
Get whatever works.
Indulge yourself.
Have an adventure.
Or maybe it's really intimate, and intense like Autumn Sonata. Or it's a lavapunk sequel to Don Quixote that rambles all across the overworld map.
Just do it for you.
Extract some value from the grind-and don't give it back.
Be dissolute-yet resolute-with your joy of creaton for its own sake.
I swear to Fred Rogers-it's worth doing at least once!
