I'm not sure. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that that is the color ink my Great Grandmother wrote with when we used to exchange letters. She used the old style Sharpies. I never cared for them because the ink runs through the sheet of paper, and I utilize both sides. So, for decades I write in Mead composition notebooks with standard black ballpoint ink pens, unless, of course, I was institutionalized; in that case I wrote on scrap paper with those little plastic pens - until I could get a hold of the standard legal sized yellow pads. I saved those, by the way, even ones as far back as 1987. I did a lot of doodling back then ... lots of cartoons of me sitting up against a tree.
These days, as I approach the age of 50 - a little more than two years to go (significant because, in Hermann Hesse's STEPPENWOLF, Harry Haller plans to commit suicide on his 50th birthday), I discovered some really cool notebooks for half price at the Barnes N Noble and purchased 12 of them. The quality of the paper allows me to use this new style Sharpie that writes ultra thin. I can write cursive small (as long as I'm not inebriated).
Maybe this is why I am not writing as much. I still use a regular Mead notebook as a "math diary" but hardly ever write in it. I also started a "Hacking Diary" because I went through some cool phase over the summer where I actually became interested in low-level operations underneath "what we see" on the screen ... It passed, but, well, I go through these phases ...
Black ink. I know someone who writes in green ink.
I did use blue ink once, but it was for a love letter ... the English part in blue ink, the broken Spanish part in pencil underneath. The love letter was a flop, by the way. I basically said, "You are a beautiful woman but I am rebelling against the economic system we live under, and I will not allow romantic feelings transform me into a slave."
So much for the blue ink!
Holden, I had stopped writing for weeks ... but for a few paragraphs ... It is no joke what too much alcohol too many days in a row does to me ... hands shake ... can't hold a pen: frightening.
Fortunately, I live on a very limited income, so, by the time I get rent paid, pay a few bills, get tobacco and groceries, my booze run only lasts so long before I have to spend the last quarters on laundry. I have trained myself to (1) PAY RENT then (2) get tobacco for the entire month (3) get 3 weeks worth of food and whatever supplies I need and (4) DO LAUNDRY and get imortant seasonal clothing --- then and only then do I allow myself beer or wine ... then whiskey ... then gin ... My last five dollars usually goes for a pint of Vodka.
It is over quickly. Of course, sometimes I have to stock up on the fancy Sharpie pens or cool notebooks that will be there for me when there is nothing else. Seriously, in hospitals or jails, I will write on scrap paper with whatever I can get my hands on. When worse comes to worse, I just think ... like when wandering in the woods and fields ... one doesn't carry around a notebook ... It's a strange world, isn't it Holden? Why do we write things down?
I can just imagine some scholar in a bunker writing down some heavy anti-capitalist manifesto, kissing the notebook, and tucking it into an elaborate chest only to be blown to bits by a drone. What's the point?
Someone must have been writing something when tsunami mommy came to wash it all away into oblivion ...
Maybe I have been writing all these years just to keep track of the inner transformations.
When I was living with a young woman, and we would run into conflicts, I always had recourse to my own reflections ... She called this "The Hermit" and she feared it. She was threatened by those parts of me that were more intimate with my heart than she could be.
At one point, I let her read anything I wrote ... and then one day I locked up the current notebook. Trouble in Paradise.