I guess it’s because I’ve carried each one of them around at different times in my life over the last few years, that the stuff I’ve tucked inside of them can say more about me than I can say about myself because they’re more objective than the words I bleed into my notebooks.

Junior year of highschool I carried my notebooks in piles on my arm because I was too stupid to give up on the shoulder bag trend. what matters most is how well you walk through the fire was always at the top of the stack between classes and open in my lap during classes. Leafing through it now feels like opening a time capsule. I’ve got a handout from first quarter of my art class, a pass from my guidance counselor excusing me from my remedial math class to talk with me about colleges, a quote my english teacher gave me that says “In everything the ends well defined are the secret of durable success,” a hot topic receipt tucked in at “born to lose,” and a torn one in “revolt in the ranks,” a ticket stub to a Julia Nunes show, a barcode from the tag of a shirt i bought that I probably don’t wear anymore,  and a piece of college mail from one of the random persistent colleges that found my psat scores and my address.

I carried Slouching Toward Nirvana around in senior year of high school, but all I’ve got left in there is the packing slip with my scribbles on it, the business card from a Pratt admissions counselor that probably felt bad for me on Portfolio day, a memo I don’t remember the significance of, and a folded in half math assignment that I never did.

When I went to Lebanon this past summer, I took with me Come On In!. I’ve got plane ticket stubs, a question I wrote down but didn’t ask for a political figure I got to meet, a napkin from the restaurant with a view from the mountains, and the speech I wrote and read to a bunch of suits, on behalf of my friends and I.

The receipts, stubs, index cards napkins and letters are scattered throughout the rest of my bukowski books. The other half of my story is told through the poems I was bookmarking. It’s weird to flip through them and be brought back to the who, what, when, where or why of the reason I was intentionally marking the pages and unintentionally documenting the moments. For now it’s Bukowski, tomorrow will be Vonnegut, and after that will be someone else. I am pulling apart these books that keep me together. I’m shoving bits of paper into the binding and they’re shoving all their words into my head to keep me second-guessing everything. I don’t know why I don’t mind letting these books get battered around. Maybe it’s because they batter me around. Maybe it’s because I know that they’ll always last in the way I think about stuff.

My middle school English teachers made sure to beat the word “stuff” out of my rhetorical vocabulary, but as I’ve gotten older and seen how black and white thoughts aren’t

and how academic intelligence isn’t

and how concrete consciousness isn’t

and how simple life insists on not being

and how much harder it is to revise the life out of the emotion of an argument

and how it gets more difficult to stay on topic as I write

well, all I can see is “Stuff.” Everything is stuff. All the stuff tucked into the bindings of my books, all the stuff that marinates the meat of an argument and lives in the marrow of the bone. They try to tenderize and suck the Stuff out of us, but we only end up drowning in it as it flows out of us later.

I don’t know. Life gets harder and you find yourself surrounded by so much Stuff in all its forms that you can’t discern so easily. Just tuck it away for later and find meaning in it when you can’t find meaning in anything else.

Or for when you finally decide to clean your room.