Notebook barf

I have a pretty disorganized brain. My notebook looks pretty much like my brain does from the inside- sprawling doodles, sketches, small notes, long rambling diatribes, catchy little phrases that I liked, quotes, etc... all thrown together haphazardly, in all directions, peppered with doodles and arrows, taking no note of which side is up or where the lines on the paper are. I find it the most relaxing way to write, and the more relaxed I am, the easier it is to come up with something I like.

I had an idea for a blog post that would just be a list of the disembodied (or, "disempoemed") bits and peices that I've always meant to work into something, but I don't have the time to sift through the jumble and come up with that. At the moment, anyway, I'd rather mention something that happened with said disorganized journal today, which made me extremely happy.

I wrote a little poem by accident today. As I was daydreaming in the booth, waiting for the show to start, I found a little phrase that I liked, drifting through my brain. "I am engaged in the business of thinking".

I continued to engage in said business for a bit, until the audience came in. I like to eye the audience from my booth-nest, and size them up, and I noticed a couple of white-bearded old men sitting together. I talk with a lot of white-bearded old men at work - none of them know much about computers. They are, generally, delightful, and they all tend to have this sort of cheerful, "white bearded old man" vibe coming off them. Or maybe that's just a professor thing. Anyway, I scribbled down the thought, right under the first one, "All white bearded old men look the same".

I rested my pen inside the journal as the show started. It remained there, in my bag, for the walk home. Upon returning home, I saw that the pen had rolled around between the pages and made a couple of marks. One of them was a line through the words "I am", in the first phrase. Another was a mark after the first phrase that looked something like a comma. The effect was this:

"Engaged in the business of thinking, all white-bearded old men look the same"

Which I liked more than both peices separately. I'm calling it my "accidental poem". Chance is awesome.

So maybe sometimes it pays to have a journal that looks like you threw up into it.