Good Evening
Another travel day.
Today, please enjoy a love letter to my favorite note taking technology.
The People v. Moleskine
After all of my trial and error with various notebook form factors over the years, somehow legal pads have emerged as the best.
Partially it’s the simplicity. There is no cover, there are no designs, and they are utterly unapologetic. It’s also the strange yellow paper. I don’t know why the paper is yellow, but I like that it is, and for some reason it is important that it is. I don’t even like the color, but it certainly could not be white.
I also find that there is a slightly nagging friction one feels when writing on them. The paper is not smooth… there is feedback and this slows me down just enough to introduce space for intention, but not so much as to be cumbersome. Great care is taken in other notebook designs to make the writing experience fluid, but the humble legal pad makes no attempt.
I like how after a while legal pads get destroyed. Pages get ripped out constantly, with varying degrees of intention. I almost never follow the lines, and because the paper is yellow, I’m more aware of their fading color.
I like the associations they have (to me) with bureaucracy and old money. I can just as easily visualize a stack of legal pads on a beautiful patrician desk at the helm of an old mansion as I can on a plastic desk in some anonymous middle manager’s grey cubicle. This contradiction thrills me.
What horrible and beautiful things have been seen by the collective consciousness of legal pads around the world!
What financial crimes and doodles and letters and IRS clerk notes about some banal tax dispute?
They are cheap. You buy them in bulk. To my knowledge, it’s quite difficult to actually buy a custom amount. You must buy them in groups. In that sense, they are resources, like wood or cotton because of this quantized property. Notebooks are one off purchases more akin to art or a computer. You are meant to do specific things with them and they are elevated into true “product status” because of this.
Legal pads are raw resources that you burn through. I also love the humor, on a personal level. That after all of these years and the twenty or so notebooks I’ve filled with my theories up in the last decade, I’ve landed on legal pads.
The feeling that I get from using them is not peace. There is no exaltation or catharsis, typically. There is a bit of tension. I don’t love them like I used to love writing in the “nice” notebooks. They even sort of annoy me.
All of this has the effect of funneling me more into what I am actually doing with them. I don’t “write to write”. I have to make choices, because I don’t want to write more than I need to in them. I cannot indulge myself so easily. Sure, perhaps this makes them less apt for “journaling” but that is kind of the point.
They are not journals they are legal pads and I burn them like fossil fuels to get to the next place.