Random Thoughts

Originally uploaded
by oneup.

I used to buy blank notebooks, some with lines, some without; the paper, it’s texture, it’s size and colour would inspire me to sketch and write.

When I was introduced to the internet I was 15 or 16 and I felt incredibly lost and ignorant of the whole business, so naturally my first thought was I have to learn how everything works followed closely by an overwhelming desire to create a webpage. I threw myself into html with a vengeance, and fully intended to learn java and C++ following that… well I got as far as putting up a web page, two, in fact, and they’re still around. Each time I learned something new I would incorporate it, making my pages huge and cumbersome, but I loved every huge picture and weird link and table. I only recently learned how to do the nifty little floating tables, so I was rather frustrated that I couldn’t make the site look exactly how I wanted it to. I never got into designing graphics, mostly because I didn’t have the programs to do it, or the time to learn them really, but eventually the learning curve levelled off and I realized that, for all it’s colour and snazziness, my page was nothing more or less than a journal in electronic form. It was slightly different, of course, since it was now an open journal, and I had a bulletin board attached to it with the thought that people could comment on content if they so wished, but it was still just a journal.

I still wrote in my paper journal during the time that I had my own site; some of my most personal and intimate writing still went into the various coloured books that I’d grown up knowing, but increasingly I used my website as a sounding board for whatever I was feeling or thinking about until I hardly used the notebooks at all. Always though, when I bought a new notebook, there was something special about the first page; something sacrosanct. I would sometimes wait months before starting a new book, thinking what would be appropriate, grand enough to fill the first page of what would eventually hold a year or so of my life. I would try not to think about what to write, as I’ve found that always ruins any semblance of flow, but I tried to wait till the light, my mood and the weather were perfect enough to approach that beautifully blank page so that I could write something worthy of it.

I’ve never written anything I was happy with in the first page of any notebook, and it’s a failure that has prompted me to often leave the very first page blank. Perhaps I hope that by the time I’ve finished the book I will have gained some new appreciation of life and be able to fill it properly (although I never do because doing so would change the decision that I‘d made at that time to leave it blank), or maybe the emptiness is simply the perfection that I’ve been striving for every time and then ruining; I don’t know, but it seems to work…on paper. There is not a satisfactory way to leave a page blank in an electronic journal, at least no way that wouldn’t be ridiculously pretentious.

It seems that I have a lot to say these days, I think some of it can go here now, now that I’ve ruined the first page.