Monday, February 27, 2006

The notebook

I carry a small notebook in my pocket for those moments when great inspiration hits me and I need to jot down my wisdom for future generations to learn from. I was looking through it for an idea for an idea for writing material and I was amused at the different topics and some just flat out weird stuff I had written down.
There is an idea I had on writing about mixed marriages. No not those kind of mixed marriages I mean the kind between people with different loves. For example I have a friend who is a rabid Carolina Tarheels fan and his wife is a howling mad Wolfpack fan. You can imagine the stress created when the two teams play one another. There is also a statement that I heard somewhere, “some people stand out in a crowd and some people try not to get swallowed by it.” For some reason I wrote down the words “case quarter”. It is an old term for a 25-cent piece. There is a first chapter for a mystery I am writing and a list of oddball characters for the book. Jumbled in amongst everything else is a sprinkling if phone numbers that of course have no names with them. There are several book titles that I want to read if I can ever find them. A handful of web sites and email addresses litter the pages. For some reason the words “blind in one ear” make an appearance.
There are a couple of pages of information on two old Singer sewing machines that I am trying to sell. A few pages of essays scribbled in miniature letters that I will have to borrow a microscope to be able to transcribe. On one page there is a list of new James Bond or maybe Dick Tracy characters that would be terrific – ratchet face, socket head, laser lips, antenna brain – I am not sure what prompted those.
My favorite thing in it is a quote from Road and Track magazine by my favorite magazine author Peter Egan. He is writing about movies that his parents would not let him see. “What is adulthood except a delayed end run around your parents better judgment?”
Too many of the things I have written I have no idea what they are or what them mean. More than a few were penned in the dark at some ungodly morning hour when I woke from an interesting dream. Some of those things that I have managed to decipher are the lines that states, “If all politicians were abducted by aliens would any one care – would any one notice?”, “being pecked to death by wild ducks”, “why doesn’t Mexico have an Olympic team? Is it because there is no Tequila drinking contest?” , and the ever popular, “feet planted firmly in mid air”
Most of the other stuff is so random that I have no idea how hard I had been hit on the head when I wrote it.
I wonder what someone would think of my mental condition if I were found unconscious with only this notebook in my possession. I am sure I would wake up nicely wrapped up in butterfly nets in a comfortable quiet padded room all my own where I could scribble strange things on as much paper as I could find.

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