THE SEA WAS ANGRY
THAT DAY, MY FRIEND.

Over and over, in my head. Like a stuck song. George telling Jerry and Elaine, "The sea was angry that day my friend." I think Kramer was there, too.

Only it's not even a song. It's just a guy saying some words—which is even worse.

The other day it was a guitar riff loop from "Are You Experienced?" That was a little more tolerable.

WME Radio. All me, all the time.

So anyway, picture this: I pull up in front of the Quick 'n Save and get out of my car. It's blustery. Not typical November weather. It's more like March. But then, it isn't November, it's February, so really it's all that unusual.

(I was thinking it was November when I started writing the above paragraph. Then I remembered it was February, but since I'm writing in a notebook, I don't want to start marking out.)

Now I'm locking the car, slightly bent at the waist. Here's the background music playing behind this scene:

"The sea was angry that day my friend."

Now I'm straightening up and turning toward the entrance to the Quick ‘n Save. I'm here to buy a notebook.

See, this afternoon I got an idea for a book on the way to the post office to mail along overdue letter to a dear friend. That's how these books of mine get started. I could be anywhere when it strikes, doing anything. Dropping my pants off at the laundry. Eating a bowl of oyster stew. It begins suddenly, with no warning, like deja vu. Pow. All of a sudden I'm writing a book. It can be the tiniest idea that kicks it off, an inkling of a storyline. Or less. One sentence.

One of my books started, "I had no idea it was a CIA kite, or that it had anything to do with the CIA." A line like that is kindling. Once ignited, it can start a raging, booklength forest fire. There I was minding my own business, walking down the street. All of a sudden I'm writing The CIA Kite.

Another of my books started like this: " ‘A gazebo in the middle of nowhere," said Rodney all of a sudden, for no apparent reason.'" Or something like that. That may not be an exact quote. But I know where I was when it started. I was walking in the park, the one across the street from the mayor's house, next to the funeral home. It's riddled with little swirly sidewalks. One of the sidewalks swirls you through a gazebo. And that's where it started. Just as I was walking through the gazebo. I could mark an X on the spot with a piece of chalk. A hundred pages later, I was still going on about the gazebo in the middle of nowhere.

This one hit me in the car. I had just turned onto Andrew Jackson Street. I was near that same park, actually. "The sea was angry that day my friend" had been playing non-stop on WME for a couple of days now, driving me crazy. "You're listening to WME Radio. All ‘The sea was angry that day my friend,' all the time."

Then's when it hit me. I think I may have even said it out loud, "I'll write a book about a guy who has this line he heard on TV playing in his head over and over!"

I know this sounds stupid, but that's how I get the ideas for these little books I write. The ones that are worth a damn, anyway. I don't know exactly how to describe it. When I'm not in the zone, it all seems mysterious. How did I ever write anything any good? How can I ever do it again? But then something clicks and it all seems easy. It's not as if I decide to write one, rather one just starts being written.

I knew if I went straight home right then and sat out in the back yard under that big pecan tree and enjoyed the blustery weather and smoked a, uh, canned ham, I could just start rambling and digressing like crazy and eventually turn it into one of those books that I don't care if anybody else can tolerate because it's just me entertaining me. Sometimes I wonder if those are the ones I may well be most revered for when my genius gets truly discovered (probably shortly after I depart this vale of laughter).

Forget about the post office. To hell with the dear friend. I'm going home. I've got a book to write.

IF, that is, I had a notebook to write it in.

Which I didn't. I'd run out. So I had to stop by the Quick ‘n Save. A delay. Damn. And that's where I am now, walking down Aisle 4 of the Quick ‘n Save, coming up on the school supplies section, hoping I'll still have this elusive seedling of a book in hand when I get home. I have to capture these things quickly.

There they are. Notebooks. I love picking out a new notebook. Over a hundred pages of pure potential, spiral bound with a little wire. All those pages filled with blue and pink lines, waiting for me to fill them up with junk. I want a red one. Seventy sheets. One subject.

Now I'm picking up a notebook and running my fingertips lightly across the paper. They've started using cheap paper in some notebooks. Rough, scratchy. You have to watch ‘em. It's hard to find a good notebook anymore, as good as the ones they used to make. I compare ‘em all back to the Blue Horse notebooks we used to use in the 3rd grade. Nothing comes close.

Ah. This one will do just fine. It's red. No Britney Spears, no Pokemon, just a plain red cover. Now to whiz by the checkout and I'm outa—oh, shit! The lottery! It must be, like, 100 million this week. And it's Thursday, too. Payday. Damn! Now here I am waiting in line behind a bunch of people eager to turn over their scant, hard-earned wages on the infinitesimal hope of a better life. And it's such a serious decision. "Give me, uh... two more Powerballs and a Big Game. No, make that two Big Games." What the fuck difference does it make, lady?

I'm not taking any chances. This is too good to pass up. I'm starting the book right here, right now, in my head. I'll commit it to memory, word by word. When I get home I'll sit down and write it all down, as best I can recall.

So the words you're seeing on the page you are reading now have been merely laid down by a stenographer. Namely, the future me. The me that exists 20 minutes from now. A mute scribe, dutifully logging the thoughts of the real author (the now me), while sitting under the pecan tree enjoying a lovely canned ham. Even if my scribe thinks of a better way to turn a phrase, his mission is to write down verbatim the words I'm dictating right now as I stand here in this lottery silently composing the beginning of a great novel. As best he can remember, of course.

Now, I am well aware that, theoretically, I could go home and find something to write in other than a notebook. But that's not how it works. Not this book anyway. What I want to do—and I've been wanting to do this for some time—is take a nice, fresh notebook, a big, fat hundred-and-twenty sheeter, and write an entire novella in it...without ever changing or marking out a single word. Sure, it's always better after you edit and re-write the twarp out of it (either that or you destroy any vestige of its original sponteniety), but the goal here is not simply to use the notebook as a scratch pad to noodle around with words that will later be entered into a computer and set in Times Roman, rather to create the finished physical book simultaneously with the unfolding of the story itself (or lack thereof). A form of live writing. Like having a conversation. I mean, when you're having a casual conversation with a friend, you don't say, "Cut! I've got a rewrite!" (Well, I do occasionally, but a normal person doesn't). Once each word is said, it's SAID.

And what better way to kick it off than describing the purchase of the very notebook you are holding in your hands? That's why I'm standing here in the God damned lottery line.

OK, here's the plan. I'll remember all this that I've written so far standing here behind this fat lady whose shorts are riding up her gargantuan ass, then go home and write it down. That's Chapter One. After that, I'll just start a Picaresque ramble and see where it goes. I'll listen to it while I'm writing it, like listening to a story on the radio.

Wait—I just remembered something. I doan need no stinkin' notebook. I still have one that my brother-in-law and his wife gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago. It's a fat one, with smooth paper—just like I like. In fact, I think it's red.

I'm free!

~ Pilliard Dickle