It is not easy to start a new notebook. For quite some time the unsullied covers and crisp pages feel cold, alien, even hostile. So as to make a new notebook my own, I start by decorating inside covers. Not so long ago I started pasting onto the covers short recent pieces printed out in very small font. That is already a beginning. It also bridges the notebooks. Rubber stamps and stickers of all sorts come next. On occasion I use smallish photographs, too. In the interstitial spaces of this haphazard collage I scribble all kinds of things until the inside covers are crammed full. Once my horror vacui has been assuaged, I can start writing for true. By the way, this note is the first one in the notebook I have just finished decorating.