Sotto Voce.

I got out of the habit of writing a morning log on my laptop a few months back. It had started out being a very useful exercise, but it was becoming forced. When the iBook had its near-fatal seizure and I ended up losing about six months’ worth of logs, that proved to be the final straw.

Recently I’ve found myself missing the activity, though. But since I spend all day on the computer, I don’t feel the need to see it first thing in the morning. (It’s bad enough I see it just before going to bed most nights — like tonight!)

So I’ve bought a journal. It should be arriving Thursday. I’ll keep it on the bedside along with my Parker Vacumatic. Pen to paper is a much more relaxing way to write in the morning. I could have just used my ubiquitous yellow legal pads, but that’s not the right medium for this sort of writing.

I also keep a “philosophical journal” (where the “Diary Entries” at left are taken from) for stuff that’s more consequential, or at least more developed, than what appears in the morning log. Up until now, the other big difference was that one was in electronic form while the other was pen to paper. But since even that distinction is going away — to the point of using pens filled from the same bottle of ink for each — the disinction will disappear as soon as I finish filling the current “philosophical journal.” At that point, the morning log will assume the duties of both. So expect to see scans from the new journal here on occasion.

Thinking things through like this is important to me.

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According to the Food and Drug Administration, taking antidepressants
increases one’s risk of committing suicide.

Ummm . . .

(*raises finger, thinks better of it, lowers finger*)

Just let the implications and scenarios play out in your head for a little
while. Trust me, they don’t get any less absurd the more you think
about them.

Having lost my brother Michael to depression-related suicide, I’m a little sensitive about psychiatry. Though I’m not prepared to go all Thomas Szasz on it quite yet, I’ve seen enough to know that it’s hard enough managing the chemicals we’re born with without dumping all kinds of poorly-understood, manufactured-for-profit ones in there and stirring vigorously while hoping for the best.

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You gotta love the Internet. There I was writing, listening to Musical Starstreams (I write better to so-called “ambient” music) when I hear, as backdrop to a song, the unmistakable voice of Alan Watts giving a lecture (For those who are interested, the song was “I Know That I Know” by Capsula, on the compilation Chilling Goddess).

Well, in it he riffs this absoutely great limerick that just goes right to the heart of my TTS dispatch on cognicentrism. So after a quick Google I find the text of the limerick, copy it, paste it in the dispatch (with proper attribution, of course), and post the tweaked file — a wonderful connection made possible by the people who live and share in the wonderful Internet Commons.

I hope you find my little “value-added” contribution a fair return of the favor.

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Even though I have been writing a fair amount lately, it’s in a different format — pen on paper. I have a thing for fountain pens, though I am not a “collector” in the same sense that I used to collect coins and lapel pins (by the bushel). I have only a few and I rotate them in and out of daily use. None of them are particularly rare or valuable, but they are all wonderful writers. Except, possibly for the Rotring 600, a solid-brass behemoth which looks like it was designed to pry open car doors at accident scenes.

Anyway, I recently purchased a Parker 51 Vac-filler from the market board at Pentrace, and it has been such a joy to write with that I find myself constantly jotting down ideas, thoughts, and extended rambles of all kinds on any paper surface I can find — the ubiquitous Ampad yellow legal pad is the handiest surface. I actually look forward to writing bills because I can use my recently reconditioned Parker Vacumatic.

It should be obvious by now that I have a thing for Parkers.

So I’ve been busy writing, even though it hasn’t been in electronic format. And since transcription is boring and scanning is fun, I may start putting some of those notes up here as graphics.

Be warned: my penmanship would never have been approved by Sr. Bernadette at St. Anne’s School in Bristol. Fortunately for me, she was not the type to whack knuckles.

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