Birth of a New Project -- The Past is Now the Present

 Looking over to my left from where I sit at my desk, there is a pile of Moleskine notebooks too numerous to count.  These are notebooks I have filled in the last nine to ten years since I found my first Moleskine notebook at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Washington DC in 1997 or 1998.  I cannot remember accurately, but I do remember finishing the notebook and starting a new one the very same day.  I guess I had a lot to "say" or write down then.

Over the course of many years, and as I played around the disaster that can be "hypergraphia," I never stopped for a second to think of the emotional benefits or the psychological damage I was inflicting on myself.  Writing always seems like the perfect blend of a justifiable activity (look, I am not wasting my time. I am doing something productive), and idling hours away that could be put to better use.  That tinge of guilt that comes from two hours of not putting the pen down is constant and not abating.  On the other hand, the pleasure of filling another notebook (or I should say, notebook after notebook after notebook) is one of incomparable accomplishment.  Either way, this is the way we doom ourselves to this activity of writing.

I have decided to put the text inside those notebooks to good work by publishing parts of it here.  I have already typed most of those notebooks into Word files, often printing them when  I have access to a "free" printer, ink and paper (yes, those are department perks), but I never go back and read them.  The act of typing those notebooks up becomes the act of reading them without the weight of censorship or any other judgment.  I type as the words are on paper and never change or fix anything.  What will be presented here are parts that I found non-compromising, not giving away identity, and/or not jeopardizing anyone's privacy.  Some of them will be random pickings, while other will be passages that I deem appropriate or valuable in some way to me. 

The entries will be without date, as my notebooks are not diaries but rather reflections of what I think, read and observe.  I confess to going into sprees of useless rambling and will try to keep those away from the posts.  In order to keep some semblance of sanity, I will number the entries and will add a short line on the title to give it a sense of direction or thematic meaning.

I hope the long-time readers of this blog enjoy this new venture.  Of course the other posts will continue between Moleskine notebook posts, and those will be titled appropriately.