Notebook #100

Twenty years (and then some) of journaling, plus the shareables of the week: Ichiro, Patty Griffin, two Tylers, and more

Yes, I give a reward for lost notebooks, but nope, haven’t lost one yet

First up today: gratitude.

Thanks to all of you who have reached out since my post last week announcing that I’m leaving WFAE radio and going back to full-time writing. I’m deeply grateful for those of y’all who signed up for subscriptions and wrote in with your support. Writing is not a live performance—you send something out into the world and have to wait to hear back. The echoes this week have warmed my heart.

Special shout-outs to Michael Graff, who led off his weekly Charlotte Optimist email with some kind words, and Tony Mecia, who wrote about my departure for the Charlotte Ledger. Michael and Tony are two of many who are doing their damndest to make local journalism work in Charlotte, and I know them both to be good and kind people. Do yourself a favor and subscribe to the Optimist and the Ledger. And please, if you’re able, support WFAE.

This week I started my 100th journal. It has been a daily ritual, with some starts and stops, for more than 20 years now. I think it’s a useful habit for everyone, so I thought you might want to hear how it became a useful habit for me.

Thinking about all this jostled up a memory about my first attempt at journaling. It did not go great.

This was back in fifth grade. I had taken to jotting little things in the back of one of my class notebooks—jokes that the other kids told, sketches of race cars, that sort of thing. One day, though, I wrote a love letter to my crush, Lynn, who was not only beautiful and talented (she played the piano!) but also was in SIXTH grade and so was obviously and completely unattainable. I wrote the letter anyway, knowing it would stay buried in the back of that notebook.

Then I had to go to the bathroom.

And while I was in the bathroom, Harvey—the kid who sat next to me—opened my notebook and found the letter and read it to the class.

I laughed when I remembered this the other day. But back then, if I could have turned into a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife, and scattered to the winds, I would gladly have done so the moment I walked back in that classroom door.

(Where was the teacher? I can’t remember. Probably, in those days, taking a smoke break.)

School gossip moves faster than the speed of light. Somehow, with minutes, Lynn herself found out about this letter and tracked me down between classes to let me know in plain and forceful terms that any romantic notions I had in my head would not be happening.

I remember tottering around the school grounds with a couple of buddies who were sticking close by my sides, as if I had taken a foul ball to the forehead and might have a concussion.

The scandal lasted only a couple of days. The gossip photons moved on to something else. But when it came to journaling, I stuck to race cars for a while. And then, for years, I didn’t write a journal at all. I remember owning a diary at some point—one of those that had a little lock on the latch—but I don’t remember ever writing in it. Whatever writing I did faced outward instead of inward. I didn’t take much time to reflect.

***

Notebook #1, in my official record, begins on April 16, 2005. Alix and I were in Seattle, taking a little vacation time after a journalism conference up there. We were walking around the Pike Place Market when I got a call from my editor back in Charlotte. I had been named as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in commentary, one of two runners-up to the winner, Connie Schultz of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. We had a joyous day wandering around the city and taking calls from friends. At some point we (Alix, probably—she’s smarter about these things) figured I should get this down on paper. So I bought a Moleskine pocket notebook somewhere, and at the end of the day, in our hotel room, wrote about what happened so I would remember.

That first notebook covered some wild times. Not long after we got back to Charlotte, I went to Asheville to cover the trial of Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph. Then, a couple months later, I drove to New Orleans to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That notebook is only about half full. I remember being totally wrung out after those few months.

The other day I pulled some other notebooks from my stash, just to see what I was up to at different times. Notebook #20 covers the time just after I got let go from Sports on Earth in 2013. I was scrambling for work and eventually got some gigs … by the end of that notebook I was working on the story I wrote for ESPN on Dean Smith.

Notebook #40, from summer 2016, includes the first germ of the idea for the podcast I’d end up starting a year and a half later:

Sadly, we did not get the music rights to “Tupelo Honey.”

Just going through a few old notebooks, I’ve found so many things I’d forgotten. I saw the North Mississippi Allstars with my friends Dan and Stephen! I had a weird dream where a girl from my old high school was stalking my friends! But there were also a lot of things that I did remember. There’s a stretch of entries where I’m working on a story with the legendary editor Jay Lovinger, one of the great mentors of my life. I remembered the feelings but the journal brought back the details, how Jay was constantly sick but always brushed it off, how he loved to talk about old movies, how he always understood just what a story needed.

There’s more personal stuff in the notebooks, too—joys and struggles I’ve shared with Alix, my constant battle with my weight, the slow dawning that Alix’s mom was showing signs of dementia. Some days I just log in the stuff that happened. Other days I empty my heart onto the page. And then there’s the debris of everyday life: a grocery list, a book I need to read, a visitor’s sticker when I went to see somebody in the hospital.

I’m so glad I’ve kept track.

At some point in all this I became a Moleskine snob. Moleskine makes many notebooks but the one I gravitated to was the softcover, ruled, pocket-size version. That’s still what I use to this day. It fits in my back pocket and the soft cover means it bends back into shape if I sit on it. They’ve all been black except for the one I’m using right now, which is green because I couldn’t find any black ones at the store. So I’m considering it the special 100th notebook edition.

(I’m not much of a pen guy, unlike my friend Joe and his fountain pens. But I have to tell you that I’m now obsessed with the Sharpie S-Gel pen in bold. I lifted one from Alix’s pen jar a few weeks ago—she couldn’t remember where she got it from so I immediately claimed it. It writes so smooth that I feel 20 percent more stylish every time I use it. FYI, none of these are paid endorsements. Use what feels good to you!)

All told, 100 notebooks comes to about 1,900 pages covering more than 7,000 days, and lord knows how many words. It’s the part of the iceberg under the waves, what holds up the tiny fraction that everybody sees above the surface. I love getting out that Moleskine every night, pulling on that little cloth bookmark until it opens to the next blank page. I love festooning the notebooks with stickers and marking ideas with miniature Post-Its and sometimes just getting out the box of old notebooks and smelling it. There’s no hard drive or cloud storage that could ever replace it.

If you’ve read this far, first, bless you, and second, I have a question or two: Do you journal? If so, what’s your process? What tools do you use? What have you gotten out of it? Drop your thoughts in the comments.

10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. For more on journaling, check out SHOW ME YOUR DIARY, a series by the lovely author Kelly McMasters. Kelly persuades other writers to open up their diaries and journals and reflect on their memories and dreams.

2. I’m a sucker for “here’s a tour of my desk” posts, and Hrishikesh Hirway has a great one in his newsletter ACCEPT COOKIES. I’m salivating over some of his gear. (Maybe I’ll do one of these with my own desk once I clean it up a little.)

3. Even though I’m a huge pro wrestling fan, I never got much into Hulk Hogan—while he was becoming a star in the WWF (now WWE), I was watching Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes in the Southern wrestling promotions. Plus, Hogan turned out to be a well-documented Bad Guy in real life. But after Hogan’s death this week, I did wonder about AJ Daulerio, who posted the sex tape of Hogan that led to the downfall of the once-great sports site Deadspin, and Daulerio’s own downfall as well. It turns out Daulerio had some thoughts. (The Small Bow)

4. I should also give Hogan this grudging respect: His match against The Rock at Wrestlemania 18 in 2002 is one of the greatest matches of all time—not for moves, but for emotion. Hogan was supposed to be the heel and The Rock was the babyface. But the fans thought otherwise. You can see the wrestlers adapt to the crowd along the way. And about 15 minutes into the video, when Hogan makes his big comeback … that’s about as hot as a crowd can get.
   

5. Lots of baseball news this week. First up: Nick Kurtz, a rookie for the Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas A’s (don’t even ask about the geography), hit FOUR HOMERS in the same game against Houston last night. For perspective: He’s just the 20th player in MLB history to hit four homers in a game*. He’s the first rookie. He had six hits overall, scored six times and drove in eight runs. And one of his other hits was a double that hit about two feet from the top of the wall. He was that close to hitting FIVE homers, which no one in MLB has ever done. What a freaking night.

   *Old Atlanta Braves fans like me remember that former Braves third baseman Bob Horner is one of the others to hit four homers in a game … and the Braves lost the game.

6. More baseball: Ichiro Suzuki—one of my top 10 all-time favorite players—is being inducted into the Hall of Fame on Sunday, and so I thought I’d share the story I wrote about him for ESPN back in 2016.

7. Intrigued by the soon-to-publish new magazine Southlands, dedicated to “the South’s wild nature.” I like that idea.

8. So much good music came out this week that I’m going to spend the rest of the weekend with headphones on. First up: Patty Griffin, whose life fell apart over the past 15 years (I didn’t know she dated, and broke up with, Robert Plant!) … she’s back with a new record called CROWN OF ROSES. (NYT)

9. Next: Tyler Childers, who has a new album called SNIPE HUNTER that Marissa Moss, writing for GQ, calls “the most visionary country album of the year.”

10. And finally, another Tyler: Tyler, the Creator, whose new record is called DON’T TAP THE GLASS. The one track I’ve heard is “Ring Ring Ring,” and it gets one of my highest compliments: It’s music for riding around on a Saturday night in high school. Something about the groove reminds me of that Lakeside classic “Fantastic Voyage.”

One final announcement here at the end: I was forced to cancel my Aug. 2 event at the Casino Theatre on St. Simons Island, GA, my hometown. I messed up my already bum right knee recently, and I should be fine but it’s going to take a few more weeks to heal. Apologies to my Georgia friends. We’re going to reschedule soon.

Have a great weekend, everybody…

—TT