This is in a black notebook with a red spine.  It’s made by ACCO Brands.  Very plain.  A good place to keep notes about where you’re going to send your stories.  For some reason, I started my lists in the back of the book rather than the beginning.  I’d like to be done, rather than just starting, I guess.

Even when you spill tea all over it, you still have to do all the stuff on your to-do list.

An entire Japanese notebook devoted to what we like to eat, what we want to eat, and what we will eat.  (You can buy these notebooks at the nice Japanese stationery store in Japantown, in San Francisco, Kinokuniya.  Many things in this store are kind of pricey.  This notebook is not.  I think it cost about $3.) 

Bossy, that’s what these categories are. Still, I love having a reason to use the little color coded dots I’m always itching to buy at the stationery store. Never having had a reason before, I only looked at them longingly.

Until now, that is!

The Moleskine reporter’s notebook is the perfect home for the stuff you clip out of glossy magazines, for the great restaurant recommendations you never have in front of you when you’re about to have the same burrito at the same burrito place for the twelve hundreth time.

I would like to report that, in the ten pages of stuff I’ve already put together, there are 16 items. Ten of them are red dot items. TEN. That’s 5/8 or a full 62.5% of the things I’m thinking about are things to eat.

Sheesh.

But here the first few are. And don’t they sound marvelous? A great bakery, right near the BART station I use every day: Crixa Cakes.

And Caffe Verbena? A cafe near Jack London Square. I saw it the other day and wondered if it’s good. Apparently, it is.

Cafe Pippo — also near my driving around route. And my gym.

As for Dopo, we’ve run out of nice restaurants to visit on nice occasions.

No more!

Eat on, I say, eat on.

It may  be a reporter’s notebook — with its stenographer’s flip top for easy access when a notable somebody tells you a secret something — but that’s not what I’m using it for.  I’m using it as my “eat this, buy this, watch this, think about this” record. 

 Complete with little colored dots next to each category.  More on that later.  For now, I’ll just say that the moleskine elastic is a pretty nifty feature and keeps the whole thing nicely together. 

new tennis shoes? silver polish? camp? A true to-do list should look like this:

• adjust foot rest to permit maximum recline
• mixed drink on table next to chair
• reading light perfectly aligned
• book open, self in chair
• all quiet
• begin

That is all.

For a very long time, I thought the source of “parfait martinique” was Wallace Stevens’s commonplace book, Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects. I must have dreamed that, because the recipe is nowhere to be found in my copy.