throwing porcelain plates at parked cars

bits of me needed a tangible thing to put into my bag, hold between thumb and longer fingers, and ears to be dogged.
my skin wanted to have pages that could collect the smells of places i have been for long enough, and stain with my oil and fluid.
some certain nerves wanted to those same paged to be burnable, tearable, chewable, and to occasionally collect my tears. i hope that some day they all would burn with a building, or that i would light them myself. occasionally i have.
i needed the pages of everything i wrote to have properties beyond what was written in them.
my ego may have wanted them to be found in the future, for a posthumous romp.
or defenestrated whimsically.

i think all of me was motivated to write, read, and collect thoughts in a way that made loads of cultural sense, and fit well with an identity that i liked, but no longer makes sense for my real lived experience. i've gone through various iterations of what i want my creative life to feel and look like. these are deeply integrated pieces of the overall questions of living for me. i am happy to admit that aesthetic and tactile elements are as important to me as any functional ones.
replacing journals, pencils/quills, matchbooks, and notepads with keyboards and touch-screens has been a slow and thoughtful process.

• precontemplation: i love everything about paper cuts, and the ways coffee stains mashed paper. i take pride in the piles of disorganized notes that make up my written "outline". ink stains are integral inspiration. 
• contemplation: i enjoy reading the blogs my friends have put together, and i can appreciate how we are able to share and discuss their written work. i love that otehr folks are able to read their creative outlets, and share thoguhts on the content. i might one day have a blog...but what would i call it. 
• determination: found a name for this thing by wondering what might be the heaviest thign someone has ever tried to balance on their head? maybe a pieno? = pianohat!
• action: start dumping all new poetry into this digital thingy. sometimes writing poems and song lyrics on paper and posting a photo of them. share pieces with a few friends who write things i like. 
• maintenance: delete posts like mad, and hate on the lack of smell/sound/taste/touch in the digital space. stop reading other blogs and return to the pages, the magazines, the beer coasters. bobble back and forth. take more pictures of written thigns to post occasionally.  
• termination: pack the bag with books, notebooks, pens, pencils, and a laptop, and head off to the cafe. 

the smell of tactile material records is one of my favorite, and the adaptability and convenience of typing, checking, editing, locating/relocating, and sharing my creative work has made a space for the digital device in my life. most of all, i enjoy having less stuff to haul around as i travel the world. a meaningful appreciation for pens and papers certainly endured, and i will likely always carry both wherever along for the battery outages and diagram illustrations. i have to remind myself, these are not the verbs that happened in the past and are finished. they happened and are ongoing.