micahsaul

Last night, I started writing a post about journals and technology:

I used to write daily in an observation journal. It started as an assignment in a fiction writing class at SFSU. Every day, I’d carry around my Moleskine daily journal and, when inspiration struck, jot down a sentence or two. These could be actual observations about my physical environment, such as: “Sky’s the color of cobalt and cream.” More often, though, they’d be short plot ideas, snippets of conversation, interesting sentences, or things I’d overheard. And then, a little over a year ago, I stopped. And I hadn’t really thought about it lately.

I also used to carry another Moleskine, this one a basic, unlined hardcover. This was just for random notes and, mostly, doodling. I’ve never claimed to be an accomplished artist. Quite the opposite in fact. But I love doodling. Mechanical pencils, fountain pens, empty white pages, and I get along really fucking well. Close at hand as I write this, I have two such notebooks, full of attempted drawings of fractals, half-completed mathematical proofs, sketches of a previous version of this website, album cover ideas for a mixtape, and a stack of Polaroid pictures. But, I haven’t really used these much in the last year. And I hadn’t really thought about them.

What the hell changed? Why can I trace my complete lack of journalling to about a year ago? On thinking about it last night, I think I’ve figured it out. I got an iPhone. Now, don’t get me wrong, I fucking love my iPhone. It’s the best piece of tech I’ve bought in years, probably since my first laptop. It’s certainly become an invaluable part of my life. But, with the internet at my fingertips, has my desire for personal expression in the analog world gone down? When I’m constantly Twittering overheards (side note, when you see “OH” in a tweet, that’s what it stands for) does the need to keep track of them in a Moleskine decrease? Why bother writing down observations about the world when I can take a picture and post it straight to Facebook or Flickr? As my digital output increases, must my analog output fade away? If so, I’m not happy about it.

So, those were my thoughts last night. And then, today, while reading my unbelievably immense list of feeds in Google Reader, I came across this wonderful bit of synchronicity. And I realized that, as with dating and death, I am not alone in having these questions. If someone has taken the time to make (really quite nice) notebooks specifically for analog tweeting, then there are a lot of us feeling this same disconnect. And so, fuck it. Today I bought a sketch pencil and some new ink for my fountain pen, and threw my old Moleskines into my bag. Let the journaling begin again. And maybe the results will find their way onto teh interwebz later, but the point is that they will begin life in the real world. You know, that place that we actually all live.