So I've got this book, a little black blank sketchbook with thick paper that i got in my first few weeks at college. I always littered all the important papers the my instructors gave me with ridiculous drawings, doing my best to be a modern day Gary Larson, so i figured it might be an idea to have a book dedicated to the drawings. I didn't have anyone to really talk to in that particular school, Kwantlen, so I ended up putting a journal entry of sorts in every day or two.
The entries often were in the form of a single line, not much more than a thought that swimmed through my head at the time I had a pen and the book at hand. It seems strange to say, but the characters that I would put into the pages of that book, the logic (or lack therof) of it's content, they were my friends in this new and relativley alien atmosphere.
I say strange because I never thought of myself as a hermit-like type of a guy, not to say that I was the traditional fashion of popular when I was still at home. The fact I had a book like this where i could record any ideas I had was reassuring. The people that I shared classrooms with seemed as disintrested as I was and we would meet only once a week for these classes, so apart from one or two people who might have one or two classes you have, it was tough to make any real connection with people. Thinking of it now, it was one of the first times i was exposed to such a large amount of people at once without scratching the surface of their character.
After a few weeks, I found myself checking my bag on the way to school, just in case i had the urge to scratch something in the little black blank sketchbook with thick paper. When waiting for a class to start, I would take out a notebook, pen, and the needed text, but I never felt ready for class without it. An unwilling anchor for my sanity sitting on my desk's fake plastic woodgrain.
I'm now in my last year of school, at a different school with different people. My peers are genuine people, the kind of people where you often think how easily you could have registered a year earlier before, and you would have never known any one of them and how much that would suck. Now that i have real relationships with real friends at my school, things are a lot better, but I am still removed from all of them geographically, them in North Vancouver and I and Richmond.
My book is still as important to me as it was before, but it is geting near the end of its life (running out of pages), so i figured i would start this here blog to have a showcase for my ideas and thoughts, like an electronic form of my trusty book. I'll still use it and get another when it is full, you can't beat the realness and intimacy of it, but there are things on here that i just can't do in the confines of a pen and paper. Pretty soon i'll put up some pages from it, then a whole bunch of other shit. So there it is, general public. Jes Raymond Matthiesen's first blog.
ps grammar and spelling mistakes add character
