Auntie's Mad at Her Sketchbook Again

Draw me a picture. Tell me a story. Give me the recipe. Press a flower. Leave a big ol' greasy fingerprint. Write down the first phone number you ever had (bet you remember!). Keep score for a game of cribbage. Add up a column of sums. Mess up the page of somebody who came before you, just for spite. Confess. Do a coin rubbing. Leave a coffee stain. Take a message. I really don't care what you do if only, just this once, somebody ELSE would mess up my sketchbook!

I don't sketch particularly well. I can *draw*, if by that we mean arriving at a competent finished product eventually through a laborious process of squinting and scratching and scrubbing and starting over and saying bad words. In my version, fists and elbows are required. If I could hand-pick my virtues, the ability to draw with an easy grace would top my list. Alas.

But I love stationery, and I can't resist buying bound sketchbooks which I am invariably sure THIS TIME I will fill with beautiful, graceful lines. It all goes well enough at first. I do a few drawings, they look pretty good. I start to think I'm getting better at this.

Then there's the clunker. Clunk. Okay, that's pretty bad, but maybe I can fix it. Maybe if I just keep fussing with it, I can turn it around.

Ow. Now it's bad and it's really BOLD because I've drawn over the lines again and again trying to get them right. I can't just draw around it, it's a great black smudge right near the beginning of my sketchbook. It dominates. It mocks. It's smelling up the joint.

So I tear the page out. It's my sketchbook, right? I paid for it. I can tear a page out if I want.

But then there's that raggedy edge. Five pages in, there it is. Every time I open the book, there it is. I can tweeze it out of the book, along with the page on the other side. I've done it before. But then the pages are kind of loose. Not bound too tight. Slippy. Say, why is this page so...oh, yeah. I remember.

It's haunted, that's what it is. It's haunted by that howling stink-burger of a drawing I did. It is imbued with my secret shame.

I've got a dozen of them. Just...make this one go away.