RECORD STORE TALES #1215: Burning the Notebooks

A sequel to #768: Scanning the Notebooks

 

You can’t keep everything forever.  This is an unfortunate truth that is one we must all face.  Eventually, you gotta throw things out.

Or, if you have a flair for the dramatic as I do, you gotta burn ’em.

I’m sure at one point in my life, I thought that these science notebooks would come in handy.  Indeed, I can’t remember how electron shells work anymore, which I used to find easy, so maybe there was some value in those books.  The real reason I hung onto them for so long was because I made so many doodles and sketches that I thought might be funny to keep.  I took a quick look and scanned some of the memorable ones (some can be seen here) but there were so, so many.  Were they all keepers?  I didn’t want to tackle that task and so I stuffed the notebooks in a corner for five years.

These books are over 35 years old now, took up too much space for something that will never be read again, and a decision had to be made.

I remember a lot of kids in highschool saying, “Ooh I’m gonna burn my notebooks as soon as school is out!”  I don’t know if they did that, but I decided to honour them by burning mine.  I kept some pages.  As I went through them, I pulled out pages with doodles and sketches and funny notes.  Those might be shown in another video later on, but for now, let’s see what some 35 year old highschool notebooks had in them that was worth saving from the fires.

As you can see, heavy metal music was always the main thing in my life.  There are guitars, there are band logos, lyrics, and a few passing grades too.

I guess the truth is, I always felt like school was something I had to do, in order to go home and listen to music at the end of the day.  I did fine, I passed, but my mom always felt I could have focused more.  I think these notebooks show she was right.  The grades were good, not great, and my attention was clearly elsewhere at times.

With notes dating back to 1988 and ’89, perhaps some earlier, it wasn’t easy to let these go.  I’ll never be able to use them to teach myself about electron shells.  The best I could do was keep some pages and use the rest to have a cool fire.

As Jon Bon Jovi said, “it’s hard letting you go.”  I hope the video is worth it.