Strange old notebooks

I have been clearing out boxes and boxes of old papers, cases where my creative life had to be swept into boxes and stuffed in corners to make room for "real life".  There's quite an assortment in those boxes: old printed manuscripts (including 3 or 4 full novels), doodles, sketches, loose pages I jotted down "pieces" on, and whole notebooks from different years.  

The notebooks are fascinating.  A typical notebook of mine might have 10 pages of math problems, maybe 5 pages of notes for games I never finished, more pages of planned factory lines and buildings for Minecraft worlds, plain journal pages, dream logs, notes from road trips, and lots of writing interlaced with sketchy bits.  The trouble is, I would use one notebook for a while and misplace it, then start another one, find the old one a year later on continue in that one, then not be able to find either one, so now I have a red notebook.  The notebooks are never entirely comfortable.  They may be too big to go covertly to a music night at a bar -- on those occasions I just bring blank sheets of paper folded in quarters.  In hotel rooms or convention events, I like a bigger notebook for more room to scribble.

I'm sure that some of these notebooks look like the ravings of a crazy person.  And in some cases, I was on a bus down in Baja, bumping along and trying to fit tiny words into a pocket-sized notebook.  Yes, I found the notebook that I kept in my pocket/sleeves while on the set of "Master and Commander".  Some of those pages got really sloppy from being bumped and jostled.  I was always able to write small, down to letters barely a millimeter high at times.  Sometimes the lighting is bad and words might overlap.  After I hit 40 my eyesight started to go downhill, so I would find myself writing words that were just a blur at the time.

If you look more closely, patterns will appear.  I usually put a date at the top of a blank page; for the past few decades it's always YYMMDD format, but I did MMDDYY before that so there were some grey areas where the numbers might go either way.  On tiny pages, I wrote poems as unbroken chunks of text with a slash for a line break and two slashes for the end of a thought.  Sometimes I had an empty head when looking at a new page and a doodle came out instead of words.  Sometimes, words were part of the doodle, other times the words went around it.  Sometimes all that came out was another damn TO DO list.

I'm posting a scans of a few pages here, hoping to entertain.  Maybe your own works have similar patterns and issues.  They all make sense to me, and flipping open an old notebook is like finding a silver mine full of quirks and oddities, thoughts from some previous version of me that I can expand on.  This week, I have found some old pieces that I want to flesh out, essentially collaborating with Myself From Twelve Years Ago".

Enjoy.