I have a front section of the Wall Street Journal that I’ve been hanging onto for a long time because I took notes on something in the margins and I thought that someday I’d be getting back to whatever it was I’d been writing. So today I had a burst of initiative and picked up the paper to transcribe these important jottings, if I could figure out what they were.
The section’s dated August 31, 2001, and I remember reading one story on the front page, about Wal-Mart’s success in Mexico. So I’ve had this thing sitting around for three years.
Trying to decipher the notes scrawled in the margins, I had no recollection what they were about at first. Some quasi-poetic musings mentioning Mount Tamalpais. Something like a prayer, too. Then a key phrase: “Over Oregon.” OK, so I was flying somewhere, looking out the window and indulging my penchant for scribbling notes on the landscape. But where was I flying? North someplace, Seattle or Portland. Haven’t been to Portland since when, January 2000. Seattle then. Maybe. Then I remembered a trip I took up to TechTV’s Seattle bureau, in a building across from the Space Needle. Yep, that was at the end of August. Flew on Southwest from Oakland, bumped into a Berkeley acquaintance who was on his way to Spokane, and I flew back the same day. What I wrote sounds like it comes from the trip north.
So what, exactly, did I scrawl? It’s quasi-poetic, remember? Maybe some other time.