Not not moving, the other kind.

I love shopping for stationery. It’s like a hobby for me. No, more than a hobby, it’s like a drug. If I were the masses, then my opiate wouldn’t be religion, buying stationery would. Or perhaps buying stationery would be my religion, and each week I’d go to the stationery shop temple, and worship at their check-out counter alter, receiving the Eucharist of a new pen or note book. I certainly doubt that I would cast off buying stationery, overcome my false consciousness, rise up and over throw my bourgeois oppressors. That’s how much I like buying stationery; it’s more important to me than placing the means of economic production into collective ownership.

Part of the reason for my love of stationery shopping is my fastidiousness about pens. I am left-handed, and like many of my sinister brethren I am prone to dragging my hand along the paper after the nib of my pen as I write. Thus, any pen I use must not have even the slightest tendency to smudge, lest my sweaty, clawed hand smears whatever heartfelt poetry I’m writing into an incomprehensible mush. Truly, left handedness is a heavy burden indeed.

I also love the thrill of starting a new notebook. Opening the cover to that first fresh blank page is like arriving in a foreign city for the first time; full of possibilities for adventure, and excitement, and romance, and fun. If notebooks were young women, then I would be a premiership footballer; smitten at first, buying the girl drinks in the nightclub, and bringing her back to my penthouse apartment, showering her with gifts in the first few weeks we know each other. But, as time passes, I get somewhat bored, and my head is turned by other women, possibly with nicer leather covers, or better quality pages, or perhaps even one of those little ribbon book marks. I have a desk drawer full of various notebooks of all different shapes and styles and sizes that I have started to fill with some creative project or other, before finding a newer, more exciting, different note book. I am a notebook man-slut.

At least you can’t catch herpes from a notebook...