Item: 1 3x5" slip of paper

Sometimes I go into other people's houses and marvel at the lack of clutter, and wonder how they do it, for they don't seem the type to have stuffed things into a closet 5 minutes before I arrived.  Perhaps it is easy for people who aren't writers.  Because my only clutter problem would basically disappear if it weren't for my always jotting things down - sentences, facts, questions, topics, clever titles, memorable lines.  Me, I always have a mass of paper floating around with no home:  I cut out and keep articles, I tear pages out of magazines, I write things down on pieces of note paper, index cards, post-it notes, notes shaped like a K, and the backs of envelopes, just to add to the hodgepodge nature of it.

This piece of paper apparently started as a to-do list, written in black ink.  But around the sides of the paper are other things, written in red ink, and seemingly unconnected:  the URL for a blog I liked, the phrase "from Day 1."  The start of some other list, apparently:

Iowa
Chocolate
Campfire smoke
Sunroof

And then, at the bottom, "You can't see it," is written in a thin black ink, and it's this that's sort of rubbing in the futility of all my scribbling, because I have no idea what that meant or was in reference to.

There's a Joan Didion essay on keeping a notebook, that I looked at this evening.  In it, she is trying to make sense of her own earlier notes (such as "smart women almost always wear black in Cuba"), and she says this:  "The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself."

Do I ever refer to these notes of mine?  Yes, and no.  In most cases, these random assemblages have to do with something I want to write, or to add to something I've started to write.  So I find one, I look at it and re-construct what I meant by it, and then put it back in the pile.  Never has one of these been useful to me in the writing itself.  In fact, going back to find my notes on the original germ of an idea often leads me the wrong way - trying to fit something back into its original container that it has already outgrown.  A strange thought occurs to me:  I might not even need all these pieces of paper.  Suppose you take them all away and my creativity survives.  These things are a security blanket.  Even I know that, really.  Take away this and all I have is me, my brain, and suddenly the stakes have risen:  I win, or I lose it all.