Ed. note: Gorjus is on vacation.
I’ve been keeping bound sketchbooks for years now; I switched to larger ones last year, but the little ones were also so great to keep in your bag, you know? The XJ-9 above is from December 30, 2001. This particular sketch book was started on 12.27.01 and placed on my bookshelf (and thus officially retired, full to the brim) on 10.16.02. As you can tell from the covers, I was very much into mementos and sustaining relationships through the time-honored tradition of the mails.
As always, I owe Candy Jernigan a debt of love and respect for the way I record and relive my life in these books.
I started doing “sequential art”—yuk—cartoons to detail what I’d done that day. The cartoon below is a typical (very rough, and much smaller than they appear here) example of one of these, from December 27, 2001.
This one is from two days later, the twenty-ninth. I still kind of wish I had gone to that Verbena show, even though I don’t really like them.
From my book, I can tell that my emotional life staggered around like a Times reporter at the Neshoba County Fair. From drawings and pasted-in objects, I read that the year started off with one girl (tickets for wine at a law school function), fell hard for another girl during April and May, 2002 (receipts she scribbled goofy notes to me on), and then going out with a totally different girl in July and August (flier from a show we went to in Starkville). What the hell? Those were the days, as they say: I was doing legal work during the day & working at MusiQuarium at night. The kind of life where jp! & Jas’n bang on your door at three in the morning because they just left a gentlemen’s club they had gone to with Steve Miller.
My friends Roi & Utah (not to be confused with Wah & Jah) got married that summer in, and we took a trip out to California?where jp! met La Federala, whom he would marry a while later (this has a history of happening: Jas?N met his wife at the wedding of Big Gray & Mame).
I keep those pesky tabs off the tops of cds and stick them in my journal. 2002 purchases:
The Beatles, Help!
Sam Cooke, Greatest Hits
The Replacements, Hootenanny
Johnny Thunders, So Alone
The Rolling Stones, Between the Buttons
The Ataris, End is Forever
The Ataris/Useless I.D., Let it Burn EP
The Turtles, 20 Greatest Hits
Ben Kweller, Sha Sha
Weezer, Pinkerton
The Gossip, Arkansas Heat EP
The Faint, Danse Macabre
Electric Light Orchestra, Greatest Hits
Sleater-Kinney, One Beat
The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
Spoon, Kill the Moonlight
Death Cab for Cutie, Forbidden Love EP
Television, Marquee Moon
Randy Newman, Good Old Boys
The Amos House Collection, Vol. II, V/A (bought for a Wheat song)
Sally keeps all her movie tickets in a legendary book (pester her & maybe we can post some pages of it one day). I just paste mine in as I remember. 2002 movies:
The Majestic
Amelie
The Royal Tenenbaums (x2)
Gosford Park
Dragonfly
Monster’s Ball
In the Bedroom
Lord of the Rings
A lot of my junk is just non sequiters that struck me as funny at the time:
And perhaps some of it is more symbolic then I ever meant it to be. This is one of my favorite true stories:
Hope you enjoyed yr Gorjus 2001-02 retrospective.
I love this. I want to leisurely peruse ALL of your journals!! Can I have them when you die?
Also: I was thinking that perhaps the other Catoptricians should do a retrospective as well. I know that at least 2 of us keep journals; surely the others have something they can use?
i never actually went to the gentlemen’s club. they left me behind as i was still bartending at the Musiquarium.
hold the freakin phone. a gentlemen’s club with steve miller? that is totally rad. i met you on somebody’s island. doo doo doo do….
Speaking of old papers…
I was looking for something on the upper shelves of the bookcase in my office today, and i found four boxes of Sally’s old graded papers from 1998 on the top shelf (I’m in 312f Lee). I started to look through them to see if she wrote any funny comments on her students’ papers, but then i decided that that would probably be a little creepy, so i just left the boxes were i found them.
but THEN, i found a bag that has four cookie sheets in it, and on the cookie sheets are magnets with little snippets of story pasted to them (a la magnet poetry style) that say things like, ” Her hair was cut short,” and “She was seen about town in a buggy with Homer Barron.”
Sally, do you know anything about these magnets? and if you do, do you think that the cookie sheets are okay to use? they look new, and i make enough cookies to merit stealing them from this office.
just wondering…
Those are actually Ann’s! They are for teaching “A Rose for Emily”—the students are supposed to put the story in chronological order. I inherited the activity, but never followed through. Figures.
But you can have the cookie sheets anyway. And toss those old papers of mine! I probably did a shitty job.
Um…and Miss Mixalot…who are you? Gimmee a clue!
oh, sorry. i should come up with an actual alias, but the last time i did that was in the tenth grade (i was wuite the online chatter), and the experience was pretty stressful. yeah. i’m alec’s girlfriend/rose’s source of weekend birthday cakes and booty jokes. so funny to see it written out that way. i phantom-read catoptric daily (unless prompted to write a story about my personal sixth grade hell or about random lee hall paper sightings).
cool. i can’t wait to make some cookies with my BRAND NEW COOKIE SHEETS. uh, and i can’t wait to play with my fun, new “a rose for emily” activity, too…
i’d throw the papers away, but they’re in heavy boxes, and it’d be too hard to get them down. plus, they add to the room’s motif of old computers, old typewriters, old computer desks, old musical snow globes, old coffee stains, etc…
note: i was NOT a very good online speller
Got it! Especially knowing that Rose and Alec are the recipients of the cookies, you doubly have my cookie sheet stealing blessing.
Are you teaching this summer? Or are you just hanging out in 312-F for fun?
Kicker of Elves and I used to share that office; at his shows, I was fond of screaming out “312-F Rocks!” Nerd.
yeah, i’m teaching this summer and doing lit. magazine stuff while generally making a mess of the place…
while yelling out “312f rocks” might have been a less-than-cool thing to do at a rock show, it’s completely understandable. this office is my portal to unprecedented amounts of departmental gossip, and it’s also the home of my link to the internet, so it’s a pretty fun place to be. well. if you’re into gossip or “web-surfing,” which i totally am.
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whoo! hi, mixalot! it is good to hear from you. but please, please never yell out “312-F rocks.”
xj-9 kills me. i laugh just looking at him. never fails.
wow…I miss you tons
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