I had decided that inspiration could not strike me of its own accord.  That I might access it only through quest, at my peril, at my frequent failure.  And so I chucked my spiral-bound Cambridge notebook, yellow pages, thick paper, alternating graph and rule print, as an optimist’s debris.

            And then I was struck, on the bus, while in the curve of a sweaty armpit of nausea, by a solid sentence.  Inspiration as evanescent as pen to paper.  Sure, I had a spotty ink pen and a crumpled receipt, but once expunged the information just decayed at the bottom of my bag. 

            I am not an organized person.  A notebook is my system.