Getting old is fun. Sure, there are days when parts of your body decide not to work. Your intestines are willy nilly about their ability to digest certain foods and products. And the new game in your life becomes ‘let’s see if I can remember that guy’s name before I have to look on Wikipedia’.
Spoiler alert: I can’t.
But one thing that comes around is your knowledge of yourself. Does this sound cliché? It most certainly does. It’s right up there on the cliché Hit Parade with ‘be true to yourself’ or some other mishigas about success.
If there’s one thing I love it’s a good notebook. My visit to Japan was almost cut short because I was ready and willing to hand over my entire bank account at a Kyoto stationary store. I would have saved enough just for an extra piece of luggage to carry home all of my new notebooks. My friend Mark is the only reason this eventuality didn’t come to pass. We went on to another week of exhilarating travel marred only by the fact that I was in possession of only two notebooks and I had brought them from Europe.
When I was forced to leave behind that shop, I convinced myself that there would be other stationary shops with those notebooks. But there were not. No matter how hard or where I looked or what I googled, there were no more notebooks like those. Those notebooks are being used by someone else – probably a Japanese guy, whose lifetime spent enjoying boundless and sleek efficiency won’t allow him to fully appreciate the notebooks. I hate him.
It was that sad state of affairs, the cliché that came before it, and about six tumblers of Irish whiskey that propelled me last Friday night as I careened towards the end of an online purchase. Seems the powers that be have made stationary rather accessible on the internet. It’s all right there and you can buy it too with virtually no supervision and no governmental regulatory policy.
But I had come across the motherlode. Slick paperback notebooks, size B6.5 – just perfect for a jacket pocket. They have a flap. A flap! With magnetics! A magnetic flap that locks the notebook shut and keeps all your secrets and laundry lists. I mean, I’m only human. A human whose intestines don’t like pods anymore. A human whose slippery memory requires the use of a notebook. And not just a notebook, 46 euros-worth of that notebook.
I had to justify it in the end. 46 euros after all is 36 euros more than 10 euros. And it’s on notebooks. I began justifying – I would use them, they would bring me joy, I wouldn’t go out for a week or so. But then I had another Irish whiskey and that jolted out a reminder: I am old. I can do what I want. So I hit click and today I received a box that contained 46 euros of notebooks and I have almost literally never been happier than at the moment I opened the box and gazed in at 46 euros of notebooks and realized they were all mine. And I was reminded of something that was said by someone in some movie and I tried to remember who it was but in the end I looked at Wikipedia and then I cracked open my first of the 46 euro stash of notebooks and I wrote down that name and now I won’t ever forget it and the notebooks have done their job. And that is what we call full circle, my friends.
Josh Brolin.
