Much Ado about NOTHING

I thought I had lost my "little black book" -- my Moleskine notebook. I was sure it must have fallen out of my backpack during the ear excavation when I was at the doctor's office yesterday. I even called the clinic at lunch time today and asked the receptionist if anyone had turned it in. "No." But then I realized that I had taken my "home" backpack, not my "work" backpack yesterday. And there it was, the black book in a little cul de sac within my black backpack. (Say that sentence 10 times fast, please.)

I'm not sure why I was so concerned. This notebook is mostly filled with doodles, shopping lists, and surreal non sequiturs. Consider the following jottings from just a few pages:

"cultivating mums and detachment"
"booking a flight to catatonia"
"turning another page in the Tumbleweed Times"
"Would rather hit a pothole than a landmine"
"He's knocked out and has a fish dream"
"He takes the dead cat to the woman's house"

Except for the second-to-last note (a seed that later blossomed into a short story), I don't know what any of these random brainwaves I scribbled down refers to, or what I was thinking when I scrawled them. But maybe that's what endears me to this little journal of banality alternating with absurdity. I can always open it up and surprise myself -- with my self.