After my last handwritten rant, I ran out of space in my Moleskine. There are a few pages left, but from sitting in my back pocket for most of this year, the bindings loosened and the final pages became awkward to use. So, I declared the 2005 Moleskine done. I finished my first Moleskine on 28 June 2004. While I wrote more on the computer this year than in the Moleskine, I still have found enough occasions to open the beautiful black book and start scribbling. There’s something almost arcane about drawing the letters, as if I was writing an incantation into a spell book. When drawing the Moleskine, I lose all temptations to edit anything but the immediate words, and I know that I’m only a page flip away from hiding from my last page’s failures. Ah, the beauty of consternations—even in talking about my Moleskine, there’s no mistaking it.

(The first scribbles of the new Moleskine.)

They sat. They talked. They bored the author until he razed their house and tortured their first children. He roamed the forest and spoke to trees, confusing them for friends he never would have had. His cheek caught on a hook and his head yanked with the fishing line until he felt sure that his cheek would rip.

“The old man doesn’t want to accept he’s getting old.”

(Scribbles end. Yeah, I know, pathetic.)

The weather is changing in Seattle. I feel I’m only a few weeks away from lighting my first fire of the season. I can’t wait. While this warm summer has been nice (at times too nice—I think my body can only take so much sunlight before I grow weary and squinty), I do miss the comfort of a dark room with a rosy fire. I miss lying on the couch, the blue and white glare of the computer screen illuminating me, while I listen to the cracking of the wood, and the pounding of the keyboard. I know I need to write more. I know I’m spending too much time in front of the other computer, the evil computer, not practicing my craft. I know many things. But seasons change and Davids change, and hopefully the things I know will coincide.

The talk. The emotional discussion. It comes up while discussing people, rewarding them with a word of praise swallowed in overflowed eyes. Getting choked up, are we? There’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all to see around here. You know the next part: now, move along. Story ideas fight me with wooden sticks. So few stories to tell except those I’m afraid to imagine. I live in a house of strangers. Wake up and play the roles, but whatever you do, don’t show yourself waking. Bad way to start. Stop thinking of rules and start writing. Too little thinking. Start planning. Where’s the outline you promised me for moments like this where I’m finding the words and the voice; I’m singing at the top of my voice but I don’t know the lyrics and I don’t know the tune. Why didn’t you provide me the sheet music? How am I to improvise without knowing the chords? Why do you insist on analogizing badly?

Blue boxes over blue tables on blue rugs. I’m not sad. I’m not sad. Terror awaits the sadness. I could throw undecipherable words on the page for hours at a time and end up having said nothing. That’s what I do: I say nothing with no plan to say anything and I talk about the endless nothing sayings as if that inandofitself is saying something. That should be a word.

Green shirt with a badge around his neck. Hair flopping behind him, crinkly and curled, like a cheap doll’s head covered in yarn. He doesn’t remember why he’s here. He knows it has something to do with making money, but he’s not sure if that’s enough anymore. He remembered a time of ideals. He met his wife with ideals. They were in a philosophy class and they were discussing Plato’s forms. The idea took him: a perfect embodiment of a Thing existing beyond our reality of the thing. His wife didn’t agree. She found it ridiculous, a child’s imaginings of a world that exists only for them and knowable only by them. He loved her at that moment.

She explained her ideals on their first date. She cared about people, but she cared about certain people more than about other people. She cared about family more than friends, friends more than neighbors, neighbors more than community, etc. She even carved out celebrities. Because she watched them and grew with them, she felt they were closer to neighbors and therefore it was all right if she cared more about them and read voraciously about their lives in trashy magazines. Her ideals were a lack of ideals. He did not share her views; he felt there was a perfect ideal, a utopia when it came to ethics and morals of society.

His wife won the argument in the philosophy class, and she won the argument about ideals. He went to work for a large corporation, made enough money to support their growing family, and found, at least in the beginning, that he was happy when she was happy, ideals be damned. He loved his family, but as time passed, he began to forget why he worked and what he worked for. His beliefs did not match the stock-price driven beliefs of his employers. He wanted his life to have a meaning besides his children—even though he loved his children beyond anything he thought possible before their existence.

The ideal question grew like a cancer in his stomach. At first it weighed down his commutes. Then he started thinking about it while he worked on his projects. He found himself staring into a world he thought he knew and enjoyed as he spoke with colleagues that he found he had less than nothing in common with. When the question began affecting his time with his children, he began to accept that this was not something that went away on its own.