As I moved through these old creative writing notebooks, I had a feeling that they were going to get less and less interesting as far as the content inside was concerned. The first few years were filled with random assignments, an entire conversation with an old girlfriend, and tons of cringe-worth and vomit-laded poetry (literally). But as teenagerdom turned into adulthood and I finally started getting a sense of direction in what I was writing and how I was writing, the journals contained more draft versions of blog posts, articles, or podcast episodes that would eventually see the light of day.

As a result, I flew through twenty years’ worth of notebooks in a single day, a period that corresponds to my entire teaching career so far; the first notebook in the pile begins on June 25, 2005 and I started teaching that August. So if you’ve read Pop Culture Affidavit or listened to In Country, that’s where the ideas and notes lived until I recorded the episodes. There are bits and pieces of posts that went into an old Livejournal that I think I deleted sometime in 2006. There’s also the beginning of my second NaNoWriMo novel, which was a “teacher novel” called Standards of Learning. I finished the 50,000 word requirement in November 2011 but after that was over, never got anywhere else with the book. I may have the draft on a hard drive somehwere, but I definitely don’t have the plot chart or any of the notes I took. It just … well, didn’t work. Thus is the tragedy, or is it beauty, of the shitty first draft.

Writing about teaching seemed to be a huge thing from 2005 until 2014. At one point, I thought I was going to write something big about teaching. It would either be the teacher novel or the teacher book. What it wound up becoming was teacher blogs that I had for a while and then gave up because I had grown tired of the lack of audience and the way that the “community” of “connected educators” had become insular. There are still times when I miss the early days of blogging and teacher blogging, where you could put something out there, follow one another’s blogs, and you’d get some real conversations going instead of just having to contend with echo chambers.

Anyway, that’s neither here no there. This is mostly about what I found in those notebooks and I’m trying my best to come up with an angle here that simply isn’t just listing stuff. Because as I made notes throughout this part of the project, I kept writing “more of the same” over and over. But before I threw out the notebooks, I did tear out several pages that I either wanted to shove into another notebook or write about here.

The nascent ideas are kind of interesting. Inside the notebooks are a couple of small sketches or notes for ideas that have either come into full bloom or I’ve made a tiny bit of progress on (or abandoned). One, from 2018, is called “The Clearinghouse” where I wrote about how I am going to go through all of my stuff and write about clearing those things out. Sound familiar? Yes, that was the original title for “The Uncollecting” before I launched it on New Year’s Day in 2019. Then there’s something called Shopping Mall Days and Multiplex Nights, which I thought was a good title for … something. Over the years, that “something” has been the title to a possible novel or a memoir.

And then there’s Looking for Wonder Girl, which was an idea for a story or book or even a screenplay (yeah, right) that’s a high school story about geeks and comic conventions and falling for someone. In fact, at one point, I thought of it as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It with the con being the Forest of Arden. Honestly, it would make a fun graphic novel, but I can’t draw.

And then there are the attempts at poetry.

Now, unlike when I was a teenager and I was writing this poetry for and about a girl whose name was a variation of Catherine (seriously … there was a Catherine, a Cathy, and a Kate), the poetry I drafted this time was never meant to be revised or seriously published. More than likely, I was working through my poetry units in AP lit and got inspired or I was reading poetry that my friends were writing and publishing. There were a bunch in there, but I found three that were worth reprinting here.

Speaking of poetry about girls, I have an old girlfriend poem.

Remnants

The smell of a random girl’s shampoo
The way someone’s lowercase “e” has
too big of a circle.
The way the air hung, humid in a June night,
when the entire world was a twin bed in a corner.
I wonder if you ever found the flower
you pressed into a dictionary.
I wonder if there’s a letter somewhere;
not one you kept, but one you neglected.
I wonder if you remember how you said
we’d barely recognize one another if we saw each other again
And how it was true when we did.

I wish I could tell you what inspired this when I wrote it in the fall of 2019. Maybe I was going through some old things and came across letters or pictures of an old girlfriend. It might have actually been that first line, that I happened to be walking somewhere and caught a whiff of someone’s shampoo or body wash and it was the exact scent I remembered from 30 years ago.

That was probably it, to be honest, because I can picture myself working through my thoughts after that scent brought up memories. Two things struck me as I was retyping it (and admittedly tweaked a few things for grammar and style). First, the voice reminds me of the way I wrote poetry at 18 or 19. Second, I like how the moment in the poem is fleeting. Remnants are what’s left over of something, so the feelings and the moments are going to be in bits and pieces, not much more than maybe a few moments before you move on. I don’t know if I properly captured that, but that’s what I was going for, especially since it was about someone I hadn’t thought about in a very long time.

This next one didn’t have a title, but it’s about coffee.

Morning coffee is the most American thing I can think of.
It’s simply another step in your routine,
set to a timer,
roughly scooped,
sloshed in a travel mug,
fulfilling its function to help you
fulfill your function in scoiety
between reminders of the errands
you’ll run on your lunch break.

Afternoon coffee in a French press is precise.
The steps you take–measuring, grinding (but not too much),
boiling, stirring, steeping–are why this
is coffee you savor.
It’s conversations you linger over–the books you read,
the albums you listen to, the films you watch.
It’s the lingering looks you hope they don’t notice
but wonder if they do while you stair out the window
you’ve tucked yourself into.

You never drink coffee at night.
When you do, it doesn’t matter where it comes from.
It’s just an accessory,
something to give your hands to do
because you need to listen.

I think I’d intended to write more lines or at least revise it because I’d started another line that I didn’t include here because I needed a conclusion to what I shared. Now, I drink coffee every day, so I assume this came from that ongoing habit and probably thinking about what it could, I don’t know, symbolize. I am an English teacher, after all, and to me, the chair isn’t blue. Anyway, it’s a bit clunky and definitely a first draft, but I do like the idea that something as simple as a cup of coffee can have significance in diferent ways in different settings or at different times of the day.

A little further down is an untitled love poem. And we know my track record with those.

We were sitting on a swing set
years after outgrowing them.
I don’t remember what we talked about,
just the glance from between
strands of your hair,
the breath between your chuckles,
and how that filled
that split second
with anticipation.

That moment between all the others
that were monumental
but not as definitive.

Compared to some of the really syrupy and terrible poetry I wrote when I was in high school, this is a masterpiece. And in case you’re curious, it is about my wife. We met at 19 and I remember more than one time where we took a walk or drive in either of our neighborhoods and hung out in a park, eventually making our way to a swing set. Even with the making out, it was as innocent as such you would expect a suburban scene to be. And personally, I like how quiet this poem is but also has a … heartbeat? … behind its imagery.

The last one in here is from April 2020. At this point, we’re a few weeks into lockdown and trying to navigate how we were all going to to our jobs as well as how we were all going to procure toilet paper. The title, therefore, is apt.

Self-Care

We are unwelcomed intruders in our own lives.
Our purpose is always as it has to be–
making sure everyone is on the right path
satisfied by our output
and ignorant of our missteps.

We solve the algebra of relationships
with the utmost urgency
and panic when we make an error in arithmetic,
adding wrong,
dividing when we should have multiplied,
the wonder why x wasn’t easy to solve for
when we were so certain of the pattern.

We come into our own picture
demanding attention not deserved
because we only deserve attention
when everyone else lets us have it
only for them to turn around
and remind us of what we don’t do.

Yeah, that’s kind of cynical? Maybe it points to my anxiety and depression? I’m clearly frustrated with how we measure ourselves in life. The math metaphor, in my opinion, kind of works, or at least I like the line about arithmetic. I also like the first line. Those months of 2020 were some of the toughest in memory, just like these last several months have been. Like everything else, I don’t know how well I captured it, but there is something to be said about trying to help yourself when you feel like you need permission or approval to do so.

I’m continuing with these notebooks, of course. My current one is about halfway done and the intent for when I get the next notebook is to keep this one around until I feel like I’ve torn out or transfered over everything I wanted to. Then, I’ll recycle it. I’ve come to like the idea of finding a place for something once it has served its purpose in my house, and that includes writing that I sometimes abandon.