Back when I was working 10 hour days and commuting an additional two hours, I developed an odd mental tic: shortly after arriving at home, usually whilst eating dinner, I would suddenly get the feeling that I had had an idea or two during the day that might have been worth remembering. The problem was (I thought at the time) that I just couldn’t — um — remember them.

Easily solved, right? Just go out and get a notebook.

But I can’t do anything easily. No, I hemmed and hawed over this momentous decision; what kind should I get? How much should I spend? I mean, there’s spiral-bound and hard and soft covers, and large and small and really small — not to mention all the electronic options available.

I found myself in a art supply/stationer near my office one day, and finally just pulled the trigger on it. And really, it’s a lovely notebook. (It is not, incidentally, a moleskine. They’re good notebooks, I’m given to understand, but it’s the associations I’m wary of: One Hemmingway is easily outweighed by countless pretentious twats. No offense if you use one, mind; that’s totally different, of course.)

I think part of the reason that I hesitated to get a notebook was because I kind of knew, deep down, that the feeling of having lost some great ideas was an illusion. No doubt a result of self-delusion as defense mechanism, to blunt the knowledge that I am wasting my life.

But, that notebook in my satchel was a sort of spur. There it sat, empty pages wanting only to be filled with something — not even anything ground-breaking. Notebooks know it is often their fate to be filled with garbage, their best ideas reworked on computer screens or typewriters, and to eventually find themselves either thrown out by the executors of estates or mouldering in archives, occasionally being pawed by scholars of the obscure. Play with me, they say. I won’t judge you. (If there has been any curiosity with regard to my religious beliefs, behold! I am obviously an animist.)

Okay. So I found myself sitting in various big-city restaurants, alone at lunch hour (the fate of all temporary workers employed by businesses with closed social scenes), with time to kill and a blank notebook. This may be a vision of Heaven for some, but I found myself unable to engage with my little black book. All I could do was sullenly pick at my curry, and wish I something to read. Even when, in a miraculous moment, I actually did have an idea that I wanted to write down.

I don’t know why I was so bothered about scribbling in a notebook whilst in public. Perhaps, in spite of the fact that nobody even glanced in my direction during my meals (it’s a truly horrible sight, watching me eat), I was afraid that somebody would get the wrong idea — that I was an aspiring writer — and confront me for my presumption. Here I am, amidst the teeming masses, letting life pass him by while scratching away  some worthless  idea and pretending to be creative. The sad sack with his nose in a book — not even a book containing some other human beings thoughts and feelings, but just wallowing in a pile of his own mental excrement. In other words, I was sure someone would point out that I was no rock ‘n roll fun.

That’s all bullshit, of course. The great thing about city life is that you could catch fire all of a sudden, from head to toe, and the only interest anyone would take in the immolation would be to wonder whether or not you (used) to live in a rent-controlled apartment in a good neighborhood.

I blame my sudden interest in what people thought of me on the fact that I was working in a marketing department at the time. A place where you could ask for the day off based on the mental anguish caused by the fact that your shoes didn’t really go with your outfit.

It’s not really important, but I did eventually overcome this phobia. I realized that since I was not attempting creativity (at least in the liberal arts-sense), I could rightly counter any out-and-out criticism by showing that I was, in fact, trying to work out a streamlined process for deploying  computers  to new employees — a process that often took two weeks or so, due to its hairy, interdepartmental nature.

I’ve lost my zest for notebooking, though. It’s all about commonplacing now. More on that, later.

Forbes.com, via a writer who is single, discovers that the unattached are discriminated against. The one thing that they don’t emphasize enough is that we are never, ever allowed to complain about being treated unfairly because, well, we’re just bitter, lonely people after all.

Oh, the joy of it all: two links to articles about book formats. Bless my geeky little soul.

You might remember that I’m interested (beyond all reason) in this topic. But don’t click on that link; click on these instead: First, Alex Remington’s piece about The Problem with Pricey Paperbacks, highlighting the lack of inexpensive mass-market editions of literary fiction (yeah! whoo-hoo!); Second, a story by Kevin Sampsell at the AP, in which he describes the things that publishers are doing about expensive hardcovers — including a publisher that’s releasing books in both hard- and softcover simultaneously. (Again, woo-hoo.)

You know, it’s funny. Shortly after I came out against hardcovers, I find myself in a situation where I’m considering them again. Chiefly because I am looking for an out of print book, and it’s the only edition of it I can find.

It’s not that the book wasn’t released in paperback; it’s just that not many of them have made it into the secondary market. So, if it weren’t for the hardcover edition standing up to the abuses of time, I might not be able to get ahold of this book. (I actually have the paperback version of it; but I got it used, and it was not well taken care of. The pitfalls of paper, I guess.)

The thing is, I have other books by this writer in paperback as well. And, though I am taking good care of them, I’m beginning to notice something. This author’s books are not tremendously popular, and can be hard to find sometimes. But I think they’re excellent, and underrated, and deserve to live on. It’s enough to make me want to buy several hardbound copies of her books so that, when I die, they will be flung off like messages in a bottle to the four corners of the Earth, where someone might rediscover them and get them reprinted.

A stupid daydream, I know. But if it were possible at all for something like this to happen, it might be more likely to occur with hardcovers. I like the solution where publishers make both available. Both is good. (And it would get me a copy of Spook Country about a year earlier.)

Links via Lindsayism and Ed.