paper

trails; apples and trees

Paper or plastic?

A once common question uttered when people did their grocery shopping that has become nearly doubly obsolete: plastic is no longer given out at stores and people no longer shop in person. But it’s a query that really only should have had one response. Paper; always, paper.

There was a time not too long ago when paper was the enemy - think of all the trees! - and plastic was our friend. You can use it to pick up after your dog! You can use it as a bathroom garbage bag! You can use one to put other plastic bags inside of, shove them under your kitchen sink, repeat until you’re stuffing bags of plastic bags inside of other plastic bags like a collection of Matryoshka dolls until you just throw all of them out anyway! We’ve evolved to have canvas bags (and some more canvas bags) that allow us to tote our purchases home without risk of the paper bag blowing out a bottom or plastic bag handles breaking. If only we remember to get them from the trunk. I guess I do need to pay for bags today. Paper, of course.

I love paper, which should shock exactly no one. It’s one of my calling cards,¹ ironically, named after something made of plastic typically used in places that no longer exist: old pay phones now act as Free Public WiFi extenders if they exist at all. Starting in 2017, I’ve filled eleven notebooks - starting with Moleskine before graduating to Leuchtturm journals - using the Bullet Journal method every day. I’m prone to putting previously completed tasks on my daily view just so I can cross them off, a simple sense of accomplishment. I’ve kept at this process for over 2,550 days and my handwriting is exactly the same as when it started: terrible. Anecdotal proof that practice doesn’t make decent let alone perfect.

But my love of paper started well before that, and it absolutely came from my dad. I remember when he brought home scratch pads from the office that had a drawing of an underside and legs, from behind (pun fully intended), with a hand scratching the rear, motion marks included. They go for a pretty penny on eBay, so I can’t be the only one with a love of paper goods.

When we cleaned out my parents’ basement in the house I grew up in, we found paper files containing tax returns from 1979. Carter was president when the taxes were submitted, but he wasn’t president when we found the files, clearly labeled for easy reference. That year was 1997, a full 15 years longer than the necessary three (we never took losses for any large losses for worthless securities or bad debts - we didn’t have money to invest - which would require holding onto them for seven). Those files had crossed state lines once, and moved houses three times. They were from a time before I even existed. Yet for some reason, he held onto them.

On that issue, I wrote recently about culling. But I left out something important. While I culled new consumption, my Economist and New York Times subscriptions, for example, I didn’t necessarily get rid of the previously consumed. I still have clippings from running track in high school that I cut from the Shoreline Times - our coach called it the Shoreline Crimes due to their unfair reporting. I hold onto that one for the locks and legs I had in that picture. I have magazines and a Wall Street Journal² article that feature my brother’s work in a filing cabinet to my left - third drawer down. I have notes from fellow attendees from a youth retreat we held with a few neighboring towns when I was in high school up in a bin in our attic. I have all my yearbooks. I don’t have much saved from college - my college experience wasn’t the best - but I do have my paper diploma somewhere in that same bin.

I have sheet music from when I learned to play the Alto Saxophone from 4th through 12th grade. They fill two - make that three - overstuffed folders in the filing cabinet behind me, in the bottom drawer at the back. Many of the songs, held together with 30+ year old cellophane tape, are duplicates (Malagueña), triplicates (Watermelon Man by Herbie Hancock, Glenn Miller’s In The Mood) or quadruplicates (Sweet Georgia Brown, where I belted out the sax solo from my first chair position). They’ve moved from my childhood home, to my first and second apartments in Connecticut, my first, second and third apartment in Brooklyn, my only apartment in California, my first and second apartment in Manhattan, my co-op in Westchester and the house we live in now. Since they were last used properly, they have traveled 5,747 miles. Every few years I take them out and look through them, reading my notes on the pages, remembering how difficult certain parts were for me to learn. I’d translate the Italian music terms in the older pieces until they were committed to memory. D.S. al Coda was and remains my favorite: go back to the sign. Also in that same filing cabinet: my taxes from 2005.

Apple and trees.

Paper takes up physical space. Stacks of it stand at varying degrees of attention and states of disarray on my desk. A piece of paper in my pocket - a recent week’s grocery list or some writing ideas I had jotted down - found before putting the jeans in the wash. Paper can be thin, like the pages of a Bible or a Library of America anthology; it can be thick, carrying literal weight - that is how paper thickness is measured - before the words you put to page give it literary weight.

Literal paper travels through physical space, ushered by actual humans as I send a handwritten note to a friend through the United States Postal Service. For the past three years, neither snow, nor rain, nor heat and nor gloom of night delay my weekly rite. I have sent over 150 notes: a simple line, a cryptic message, a note of thanks, a birthday wish, my condolences, a word or two of encouragement, a postcard from a new city. A text message can convey the same thought but paper denotes effort. Each note costs me 64 cents, some time and a trip to the mailbox.³ I have yet to live down the (generic) “good effort, tries hard” comments on my report cards; I don’t plan to stop anytime soon.

Speaking of effort, it’s gone from gift giving, too. When one orders a gift for someone on Amazon, it says, “I care, but not that much.” There’s nothing worse than opening the shipping box with the item unwrapped and finding the little note - though I recognize that it is paper - with a message from the sender without correct punctuation or line spacing. I take that back: the other note in the box with a QR code to send the person a thank you note via Amazon takes the cake (not freshly made, store bought).

This summer, on a trip to visit friends in England, I chose a hotel in London because they provided hand-pressed paper for notes and letters home. When said paper wasn’t in my room, I called to the front desk where, confused, reception sent someone to find a few sheets. While I never used them in London, I still have them, and plan to put them to use.

Perhaps for sketching out a new idea. The motto of those Leuchtturm journals I use is “Denken mit der Hand” - thinking with the hand. I can’t start a visual slide on my computer without first roughing what it needs to have, and how it needs to look, on a plain piece of A4.⁴ Or multiple pieces of it. It’s how I think, and there is something inelegant in how my ideas come together if I jump in without putting pencil to paper first. And it’s not even the end result - my notes and thoughts on the page - that I aim for. It is the journey of the pencil, not the destination on the page. I also have a very specific type of paper my journals need to have. Dot grid matrix. They provide just enough structure to keep an even space, allow the foundations for formal penciled grids when needed, yet allow for creativity to be unencumbered by strict lines. See also: rules to live by as a dad.

There was a time when I used an iPad to write up all my notes at work (see: poor handwriting). But I’ve found that despite my poor handwriting, I retain more when I write it physically, as opposed to doing what I’m doing this second: typing. As I typed the earlier paragraphs, my daughter came to me with that iPad - at 10, it’s almost as old as she is - and read me a poem she wrote for school.

Books, oh look how the world’s changed
The world used to love you books,
Look at how it’s changed

The world used to rely on you books,
Look at how it’s changed

The world used to want you books,
Look at how it’s changed

The world just stares at their phone now books,
Why’d it have to change?

Apples and trees.

Speaking of (big) apples and trees, as their origins connote, naturally, I will continue with books. Not ebooks, though I’ll concede they are better travel companions than a 3.6 pound copy of The Power Broker and our local library’s affiliation with Overdrive does make it incredible easy to download a book to your Kindle without forking over any money to Bezos and friends. Not audiobooks, which are just long-form podcasts, though long trips with kids are made better with an audio version of Treasure Island on the Libby app. But actual, physical, library-scented, densely-heavy, liable-to-break-skin-if-they-fall-on-our-face-while-slipping-into-sleep-at-night, books. I should use the library more often for physical books - and our county’s system is truly incredible - but I can’t bring myself to doing so for two simple reasons: friction and function. The same friction that creates a fire lights up the pages with notes, asides, and marginalia which serve a function: to make my experience part of the book itself. Reading, when done correctly, is a volley between the writer and the reader. It is active, not passive. Podcasts, movies, television shows, and even audiobooks are all passive. There is no conversation taking place.

But boy do those printed versions take up space.

For that reason I give away most books I read. I pass them on to friends and, if I finally get around to it, strangers through a Little Free Library on my front lawn. At the direction of my wife, I took my own advice, cleaned off the three-books-deep shelves of books and donated multiple boxes to charity - though I have special dispensation to keep a number of boxes in the basement. This year for the holidays, I gifted books - new ones - to coworkers, friends, and family. Perhaps it’s foolish of me to try to pass my love of books to others. But here we are.

As kids, my brother and I were given our grandfather’s old World Book Encyclopedia from the late 1960s. They were organized by letter with each one getting its own book, except for M, which was split into two. Parts of my cited research on Tulip trees for my fourth grade project were found in those pages. I would sit, sometimes for hours, flipping through a random letter to read the flora and fauna of random topics. I can almost smell the glue and glossy pages as I write this. In earlier drafts, it was at this time that I was going to note that we no longer flip through things - photo albums, Toys ‘R’ Us’ Annual Toy Catalogs, magazines, books - and how those moments of boredom create curiosities, when I realized that the one place we (not me) still flip through is TikTok, Instagram, Facebook etc. The problem is that when you linger even a nanosecond too long, you now have a new favorite thing for which your feed will perpetually show, no matter what. The World Book never remembered your peccadilloes.

The word ephemera is a bit of a chimera: a hybrid word of duality. On one hand, it can be used to describe something to be used for a brief period of time; to be discarded upon use. On the other hand - the one holding onto that concert ticket, that baseball ticket stub, that movie ticket from your first date - it refers to items that you hold onto that are not meant to have a purpose beyond the short-term. When looking at tickets to an upcoming show at the Capitol Theatre (Porno for Pyros), I noted⁵ that Ticketmaster provides a “virtual commemorative ticket” for the show. I don’t even know where to begin with that. Just like the 1s and 0s that make it up, something digital is binary: it both exists and doesn’t exist. It is tangible in the figurative sense, but not the literal sense. It has value, but you can’t touch it. It can’t be ephemera; it’s ephemeral.

There’s a commercial from the early ‘90s. The touch, the feel of cotton: the fabric of our lives. And like cotton, which for centuries was used to make paper, it is tactile. Paper begs you to use a pen - watch out, it may bleed if you’re not careful - or if you’re like me, a pencil. That pencil requires you to scrap bits of cedar to expose the graphite. You can feel the pencil glide against the page with the slight scratch of friction. Fingers keep the residue of your work. Paper allows you to literally leave your mark. Sure, you can erase your words, but the imprint remains. And if you’re still not satisfied with the results, you can rip it, you can tear it, you can crumble it, you can burn it. Computers’ facsimile sound when taking out the trash is no match. Paper beats rock, which contains silicon; therefore, paper beats silicon (valley).

I’m not sure what any of this has to do with being a man. Or being a better man. Perhaps it doesn’t.

Or perhaps it means everything. About leaving your mark - both literal and figurative. About letting someone know how you feel. About putting actual effort into something, instead of having someone else do it. About doing the work; a “good effort, tries hard.” About leaving an impression as a result of your action. If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in big block letters while working on his last novel, The Last Tycoon, “ACTION IS CHARACTER”, then paper is that character preserved.

On third thought, I was probably right the first time.

1. Colorful pants, and loud but tasteful button-down shirts are two others.

2. This mistakenly referenced the New York Times in the original post and has been adjusted to reflect my error. Thanks for the catch, brother!

3. On a recent early morning on our way to the airport, my wife and I saw what appeared to be a new blue mailbox in front of the house next to us. Alas, it was just a folding chair, dimly lit with the just rising sun.

4. OK, now I’m getting unnecessarily fancy: it’s just letter size here in the US.

5. Mentally, not with pencil to paper. I’m strange, but I’m not that weird.