I am an absolute fuckin' fiend for notebooks.

As I write this, with no intention aforethought, I have within arm’s reach two (2) Rocketbooks, one (1) Leuchtturm 1917, two (2) Field Notes, one (1) Moleskine Cahier, a Daily Athlete journal and then the Travelers Notebook I got for Christmas and am actually using today.

Plus, you know, refills for it. Six of those.

My COVID project - besides avoiding COVID - was to relearn cursive. I read some article about handwriting being good for your brain, and firmly believing that my brain can use all the help it can get, I set about dusting off the ol' penmanship (shoutout to Mrs. Gibson at Queen Palmer elementary back in the day) and here I am, years later, still hammering away at it. My wife hated my cursive project, by the way. After 23 years of reading my printing, she found it super jarring that my handwriting had changed overnight. She took it strangely personally. I don’t entirely get it, but I do remember to print grocery lists and birthday cards out of respect for it.

It also resulted in a very strange interlude one Saturday morning at my former smashmouth jiu jitsu gym, where I showed the Daily Athlete journal to someone, and a roomful of shirtless, sweaty, blue collar grapplers oohed and ahhed in earnest over my penmanship. Cursive is akin to witchcraft to the under-25 set, it seems.

There is something really meditative about the tactile experience of writing with a pen on paper. I jot my thoughts all day long and very rarely am I interested in going back and reading them again. By and large, information I actually need makes its way into Capacities, where I can use it for various D&D and job-related stuff. No, the notebooks are there for the writing in, not the reading from.

To the extent there’s any utility behind my scribbling, I do some very rudimentary bullet journaling for work tasks (unlined passport size saddle-stitch notebook (1 of 3 in the travelers notebook) is devoted to this). I keep it super simple, though. Bullet points, cross-outs, and arrows to re-schedule things, and that’s it. No tape, no ribbons, no charts. I don’t begrudge folks who opt for the fancy stuff. It just doesn’t give me the same soothing satisfaction as writing, writing, writing.

I also have strong opinions about pens, but that’s for another day…