IN WHICH THE AUTHOR FINDS THE BLUE NOTEBOOK

Now that I quit my jobs, moved out of my house and actualized my aspiration to travel for 7 months, culminating in the final installment of the bocce saga, I had the task of figuring out what to do next. I passed the spring at my parents’ house, substitute teaching in Salinas and filling a temporary vacancy at a restaurant for which I used to work. I also spent my time going through all of my things, everything that ended up in my parents’ garage from my house in Monterey, all of the boxes of things, from my years before that in Portland, further buried in the garage, and the shelves and and drawers of things resting in my childhood bedroom.

The year before, as I applied to three graduate school programs, I tore through the Portland boxes trying to find old essays that might prove I was a world-class scholar. I could not locate the essays I sought and, perhaps inconsequentially, did not make my case. I quit my jobs and moved out of my house anyway and spent all my money on the aforementioned 7-month journey. 

Now I was looking for a blue spiral-bound detachable graph paper notebook that I took to school in 2005, in which, as I recall, lay the origins of my disillusionment with Jack Kerouac. I spilled boxes of postcards, fliers, photocopied readings, letters, drawings, exquisite corpse collaborative poetry, notebooks, B+-quality English essays, and I found, first, the red MEAD notebook, and then its blue companion. Each had a fraction of its perforated pages already removed, but the blue one had many more missing. 

I remembered I had used both as the equipment for a collaborative biography on a man named Ed. When we started I had torn out all of the written on pages—ironically to preserve them—transcribed the entirety of his end of our first interview, and gave him the notebook to hold on to. He insisted I keep it for him and I did, filling a page every few days for the rest of that summer. I wrote about the experience working with Ed from my own perspective in the red notebook. For the next six years I didn’t write another word in either. 

I continued to search through the pile, now for the sheets removed from the blue notebook, but I found only the detached pages I did not seek.