How many notebooks do I keep, and what do I keep within them? There are only a few that are full, and a handful that are still “active.” But not all of them are dedicated to writing. In fact, most are among those everything notebooks that also happen to be decorated with some writing. I must also keep them alongside the others, not for archival purposes, but for… Well, it is mostly for archival purposes. I simply cannot make peace with the idea that something someone writes is thrown away. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a weird hoarder of manuscripts that collect pieces of paper from bins. I just experience some cognitive dissonance when I throw away some text. Maybe that’s why I should also count the little square papers on my desk as another notebook that I keep however disorganized they are. One of them is even a parody of itself! I don’t know how many of these I’ve thrown away over the years. It has always taken a lot of self-convincing for some reason.

Square paper that is a parody of itself

There also is this website. It also contains some entries that don’t exist in any other of my notebooks. So, in that sense, this website is another notebook, and by extension, my drafts folder, which serves a similar purpose to those little square papers. There are many half-baked ideas, one-liners, and files with just a title with no content. I also don’t like to throw these away, but sometimes, I do.

On another note, I try to minimize my corrections on these entries, and I don’t take down a thing that I’ve published here by principle. But even that has an exception that I’ve evidently made myself forget about. It now rests in the drafts folder as a singular specimen of its kind. Makes you want to hack into the mainframe and dig it out, right? What can be so important that this guy breached his own Principles—with a capital P—to hide it away from us? Why would he take that down while all these cringy stuff are still openly accessible here?

Wait, how many notebooks does it make in the end? I don’t know, but it’s at least 1.