Post 800: Ideas

I celebrated my 800th post between here and the Observatory a while back, and since these two spots are quite similar, it made a certain kind of sense. But now I've reached 800 alone on this site, and it's got me thinking.

Ideas.

Over the course of 800 posts there have been a lot of ideas discussed. There have been, of course, a handful of posts about "going away" or "been too busy" or "be back soon", and that topic has been addressed before. There's not much more to say about them. The best one I can remember in that vein, the time-waster/spot-filler was from the Fourth of July in 2010. I think I mentioned that before, too.

Repetition.

Over the course of 800 posts there have been a few repetitive discussions, but I really try to keep that to a minimum. The 3 worst are these centennial marks. Posts 300, 400, and 500 are mostly the same post, and that's the kind of garbage I really try to avoid. Even if it's a filler piece (labeled as such) about the uniforms the baseball players currently in Oakland wear, I try to keep it specifically different than anything that came before it.

Ideas. Repetition. Lots of ideas, trying to limit the repetition. I think I've done okay. Well, you might agree if you've read any of these posts, but maybe not if you've read my sports blog. Yeesh. That's why I try to report on so much college baseball and Olympic volleyball qualifying matches.

But, 800 posts is home to lots of ideas and possibly some knowledge, and many, many anecdotes. Maybe a story here and there, but mostly anecdotes. Anecdotes are just ideas, ideas of things that happened to me in some reality situation, I guess.

The nature of the topics of this blog is a little like my own brain: all over the place. There are very few of these posts that came solely out of researching. Don't get me wrong; I research plenty. But I have an idea for a post and then I research it. The vast majority of these posts are just random ideas I had or were prompted into by interactions with others. Of the ones that came from research alone, it was because of an idea that I did have that caused me to do research in the first place, and once that topic was worn out, something else tangentially associated with the research piqued me, and a new post was born.

But here, in this computer where I type, the idea is placed down onto electronic stone, and it shall be posted independently of this computer, able to be accessed and updated from any place on the planet with an internet connection. That's the interesting new paradigm, and one that doesn't fit with my fiction.

The only real embellishments I use in my anecdotal posts are attitudinal, and even then it's rare. People act a certain way around me, and I write about it for this forum--for me, really, right? Well, the anecdotes and stories here about what happens to me are true. The historical summations I give are as true to my understanding of my sources as possible. This is essentially all editorial or journalistic. I'm not making this up. It's non-fiction.

 I do have a few posts that use elements of how I present my fiction, like the "One Time" post about Norm or the "Meaning of Pop-Culture" post about Tony, but that's more stylistic than anything else. Maybe also "The Triumph of the Fan" about Dan, but less so. That one's more love and heart than deliberately stylish.

My fiction is a different enterprise. I definitely do not post it up on the interweb for all to read for free. Not that I charge anybody for it necessarily, but I don't hand that stuff out to strangers just yet. There needs to be some mystery left in the world. There needs to be some anticipation...something, I don't know. I take it more seriously because I'm an artist.

Those things--various writing tidbits and content--do exist embedded in very specific computers that are inaccessible to everyone but Corrie and me. Since she wouldn't know what my filing system is all about, or what to make of what she could find, it's really only a pair of spots for me.

And then there's the paper.

Recently I went through and adopted a much needed new filing system. I'd been planning this for years, and obtained the filing cabinet, folders, and hangy-deals while living at the Dwyce House in Austin. After Corrie went to bed the other night, I started to set up shop in the living room. For those writers out there, you can get the idea, right?

The Dali book in the lower left corner was used for pushing folded pages back to a regular flat position. Piles were things like: "College: Poly #1"; "High School"; "College: Sierra". There were story specific piles as well. After some beers and a few episodes of The X-Files to keep the sound going, I ended up with this beautiful bastard:

You'll be able to see story specific stuff, but the image of everything all collected up nice is too awesome for me to resist.

So, there's a whole drawer full of ideas. I have the interweb. And I also have a series of notebooks. I've been keeping notebooks for many, many years. I used to have collections of spiral bound notes all over the place (thanks drawer), but I eventually got serious. I had many notes on a new direction in Newtonian kinematics I was exploring, but they were all over the place--literally, because of my poor basic organizational skills. I bought a notebook and collected them all, hoping to use it for my senior project in math. Yeah, I was, uh, creating a new physics and mathematical nomenclature system in my spare time.

I never tried to hide my true nerd calling.

That notebook is the first notebook below, in the first position on top row. The inscribed dates are from 2/22/2003 to 11/2/2004, Election Day. I remember writing the last note under where I taped my voter stub sitting at my desk in my office during grad school. The notebook is full of dreams, story tidbits, outlines, scenes, premises, math notes, glued-in movie stubs, cool pictures from the newspaper, random paper trinkets, and the occasional comic strip. The cover is of the smooth faux-leather variety.

The second notebook on the top row, the one with my carved initials has a more fabric-y texture for the front and back cover. I bought it right before we left for our European trip, and finished it after we got back from our Mexican wedding and honeymoon. It's thus dated 7/26/2005 to 7/13/2008. It covers Europe, then the last bit of the San Luis stuff, and then it got a little crazy in Brooklyn. There is so much stuff glued into this notebook it's almost embarrassing. It's easily doubled in size. If anyone ever comes over to our apartment and you want to look at some Brooklyn/NYC scrapbooking at its finest, feel free to check it out. There are whole articles about our Bed-Stuy neighborhood, other things about places I worked or people I worked for, other stuff about random shit I saw or thought of...it's pretty wild.

The third notebook up there has the number "3" carved into the cover...it's easier to see in person. That one is even thicker that the second, but that could be due to the pages themselves being thicker. This notebook is handmade from Tibet, and this includes the paper as well. It was cool to look at and touch, and I was trying something new, but it turns out to be a dirty bastard to write in. The first page has the word "test" written by about five different kinds of utensil, just to see what would could be read while not bleeding through to the other side. It was very complicated. This is the only book that has any Texas scraps. I bought it in New York, used it in Texas, used it Long Beach, and eventually forsake the last few pages for the notebook with the number "4" carved on it. I did return to fill out the last few pages, and so it is dated 3/16/2009 to 4/27/2012.

The last page notes that there are more pages of notes from Long Beach than there are from Austin, and that in general there aren't too many notes from that era in my other sources. Two jobs for the majority of the time living there probably explains it.

Notebook 4 I'm currently using, but am close to finishing. The cover is one of the smoother plastic/pleather deals. It's dated from 8/19/2011, but I didn't really start using it until a few weeks later in September.

The bottom row is split up between two important kinds of notebooks. The left two are Moleskins. The smaller is my OG Moleskine, dated 5/13/2007 to 7/6/2009, and the second, larger one is still in use, started 8/22/2009. These two notebooks collect story notes only. They are full of nothing but story ideas, outlines, snippets, and scenes. The two notebooks on the right are also very important, but in a different way: they hold plenty of scribbled blog notes. The red one has a "B" and a star carved onto it (I filled in the carving with ink), to signify it's status as a 'blogstar'. It was a gift from my mom at Decemberween. The last one up there was part of the package stuff from my promotion that got us back to California, and I used it plenty in Texas for blog ideas and interviews with the peeps who'll star in my third novel in the pipeline, the
"Texas Novel" as I refer to it (even though it has a name).

Blog notes and ideas show up everywhere. If a story idea comes a rushing out, and the Moleskine isn't around, I inscribe it in a numbered notebook (currently #4), and then later transcribe it in the Moleskine. Those little bastards are so full of ideas that it's a little nerve-wracking to take them too many places for fear of loss.

Ideas.

This post is me laid bare.

This post is me saying "bring it the fuck on".

This post is me canning fear.

I have a leg full of staples and a brain full of ideas, and one will definitely be relieved before the other.