Wreck This Monday.

My friend, Emily, gave me this journal last year. Inside, each page has some prompt to do something anarchical to the book. I admit, it took me some time to get over my natural reverence for a book, but I'm easing into it, doing some things and not doing others and still treating it like a notebook where I jot down ideas for how this novel should play out.

I've also been doing a lot of drawing in it. I chewed a page. I crumpled a page. I tore out a page and threw it away. But nothing I've done can match what some of the Amazon readers have done. So I can see I have to step up.

Here are a few pages submitted by others:

This makes my attempt look positively constipated.


I'm OCD-ish about making a mess, so I've stayed away from putting food and other gunk in the book, but obviously this person had no such qualms. I can see I need to lose some inhibitions here.


Nice circles.


I have not burned my page, but that's just because they don't let me play near open flames.

The author, if Ms. Smith can be described as such, has a web site for this project. I hesitated reading any of it because I suspected she would take this whole fun thing a bit too seriously. When I did scan the opening page, I sadly discovered that I was right to be suspicious. Here's a line from her site:

That we will all come up against some kinds of blocks or impasses (some pages are harder for us than others), based on our own personal relationship with destruction and our own perfectionistic tendencies.

Blah blah blah. Thank you Dr. Freud.

If you go to Amazon, read some of the reviews. Most people have the right attitude. But, of course, there's always one person who just doesn't get it. Here's marie antoinette (I'm guessing that's not her real name) doing a bad impersonation of a tight-assed e e cummings:

"i thought this was an actual journal, but it is more of a crafting project, a bad crafting project at that. i would have given it 0 stars, but that was not an option."

Uh, marie, you know the pages are mostly blank, right? And there are no journal police out there who can force you to chew on a page, right? And you can use those blank pages for anything you want, including as an actual journal? You get that, right?

Apparently not.

So, in the spirit of this journal, and in an effort to bring a little light to your Monday, I'm inviting all my readers to wreck this blog. Throw it out the window. Cover it in tomato sauce. Set it on fire. Press your backside against the screen.

You'll feel better once you've shed those pesky "perfectionist tendencies." I promise.