Take Note
Joan Didion, baby mama of gloomy girls everywhere, declared that she kept a notebook not to record what happened, exactly, but to remember what she noticed.
“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss,” she writes.
I too have dabbled in the art of notebook keeping over the years, mostly in the form of word docs on my computer. Poring over these palimpsests of ambivalence (my true north) can be wistful-making, and often cringeworthy, as it appears I have been working through similar shades of strum und drang for the past few decades. Frequently I will do the “this day in history” thing where I call up that document from the years before. I write this on May 17, 2018, and, for example, on the same day in 2016 I was embroiled in a dastardly scheme to “improve myself” by kicking caffeine. I described a brunch outing to Ft Defiance as such: “Sat before a row of artisanal coffee filters with hot water from a skinny spout swirling in circles to percolate. Was absolute torture; pornographic.”
I’d totally erased that episode from my memory, so it’s curious to revisit. [ed note: The experiment was a flash in the pan. I still mainline coffee every morning for the benefit of humanity.]
But what stands out to me most of all in these private dispatches is the urge to narrativize, the tendency to talk myself down from the ledge. I’ll lay out my challenges, evaluate them from multiple vantages, and then attempt to convince myself to take the long view, to look on the bright side. That’s all fine and good and actually pretty helpful, but these diary entries read more as pep talk than honest inventory.
Turns out that the truest snapshot into the preoccupations of the day resides in an app that comes standard on most smartphones—Notes. I currently have 1,505 Notes to self, dating back to 2011, and these, my dears, are the most unvarnished glimpse into my brain at the time.
That’s why this week I am recommending that you take copious Notes and never erase them.
One doesn’t use Notes to editorialize experience- it’s just raw data. My earliest Note, dating back to July 3, 2011, is directions to Herring Cove beach in Provincetown, MA. Like biting into a Proustian Madeline, suddenly I am flooded with the memory of the summer is spent at the Norman Mailer Center, and the beloved couple who adopted me as I dined alone in a restaurant on Commercial Street, John and Tony, who opened up P-Town to me. I recall not knowing how to use my brandy new iPhone, and Tony typing directions into the Note for me, and then going dancing with them afterward, even though I was gross from the bus and the ferry but not a single man gave me the slightest glance so who cared, and the feeling that the summer would be long, and good. It was.
May 14, 2012- a little joke to myself “Hello, can you SAY renaissance woman?! (I can’t really and actually don’t know how to pronounce it.)” That still makes me laugh.
February 22, 2013- a great quote from the Lanigan Schmidt exhibit at PS 1 that had hitherto been wiped from my mental hard drive: “Good taste is the final refuge for the unimaginative.”
Also, Feb 22, 2013- “As a child I found the Clue board game terrifying.” Why was I thinking about this on that day? Was I somehow triggered by a Colonel Mustard lookalike at the exhibit?
May 6, 2013- A catchphrase I was trying to make happen, a la Fetch, to convey those who are all swagger and no substance: “Do you have any chips for that salsa?”
May 23, 2013: “Idea: quitting Bravo. I know my life would be better but I can’t stop. Watching LA Shrinks is my nadir.” The struggle is as real today as in 2013.
June 10, 2013- a proto version of what would become the lede to the Michael Jackson death hoax chapter of Playing Dead (I cannot write it here, far too gruesome, but TRUST ME it was cool to stumble upon the DNA of what would become part of a book)
June 28, 2013- “Operation Mincemeat”
October 11, 2013- “Be a twig in the stream of the story.” Good advice!
November 1, 2013- “Ablutions, noisome” I reckon these are new words I learned that enchanted me rather than some imperative about bathing in stinky water.
January 7, 2014- A list of things I needed to remember to move out of the apartment I shared with my ex after we broke up: “mirror, wrap frames, stuff in closet, vacuum, bike”—this to me feels more vivid and poignant than any prose I wrote at the time.
January 28, 2014- “Madame, are you quite insane?” Note to self?
March 25, 2015- “secret, fell as verbs”
March 28, 2015- “What if I didn’t have to be tired? What if this time is yet another massive opportunity yawning at my feet?” No idea, but I like the sentiment.
September 10, 2015- “Fuckboys: the way we live now.”
May 1, 2017- “Rua di Ribiera” A street where Scott and I stayed Porto
January 15, 2018- “beastly, ghastly”
February 13, 2018- “profile on Maury Povich, esp on racial stuff” If any editors out there would like to assign this, I’m available.
February 15, 2018- “I want older friends” If any elders out there want to be my friend, hit me up.
May 14, 2018- “Letter of Rec idea: Notes app”
**********RECCOMENDATION RECALL***********
Devoted readers of LOR will recall that a while back I urged you to visit my witch who was healing me with all manner of herbs and potions. I am here today to rescind this recommendation!!!! As you know, I was referred to my witch by my shaman. I had occasion to catch up with my shaman a while back, and I inquired if he’d seen our witch lately. Much to my surprise, he revealed that he suspected our witch had been poisoning him in a sort of Munchausen-by-proxy scheme! This was of course very distressing news, and I have severed relations with the witch since. So, if you are still on the market for a witch I beseech you to proceed with caution!
What’s up with me? Glad you asked….
Baby’s first story in the New York Times!
My prison dispatches for Medium are still poppin’, here and here!
What’s on your Notes app these days?
Xoxo gossip girl aka lizgreenwood4u aka quiz queenwood aka liz