FREQUENCY CHANGE

Learning to Write (Again)

The Daily Word #82: Bang | 399

© 2026 Photo by the Author

My wife and I invariably hit the clearance section when we make our weekly to bi-weekly runs to our local Walmart. Most times out of ten there is little to nothing of interest or “true” value when we make our pass through the always-crowded aisle.

On one occasion, though, I found some thing(s) that offered awesome bang for my Wally World buck. It was perhaps in the spring or at some other now-unremembered off-season point when I found the coolest little notebooks for a mere $0.50 per. I took every single one of them off the shelf and threw them in our cart.

I loved them because they were semi-portable. I loved them because they were a perfect message for the platform formerly known as Twitter: “BE KIND” in not only ALL CAPS, but also in rainbow coloring. How much more effing perfect could they be? I don’t have a Twitter account, by the way, but if I did, I’d use some variation of this story’s picture as my profile pic, just to see how much and how often I’d get trolled.

I use these notebooks in a couple different ways: I have one of them I use to track songs I know and songs I want to know on my bass. I have this dorky system where I turn the book upside down and completely over for one list, and then just normal working orientation for the other. It’s effective because at 120 pages and one line per song, I’m thinking it’ll hold more song titles than I’ll ever know or ever get around to knowing. Perfect.

The other thing these little notebooks are great for is journaling. They do, after all, say “JOURNAL” right on the little attached price tag thingy. When I was writing in one of these one day, the idea that came out and inked itself onto the page was from a long ago set of days all the way back in 1978, or thereabouts. Two of my HS English teachers, Mr. Erlewine and Mrs. Moe, came to mind, both of whom encouraged and corrected my writing.

Remembering that feedback, applying it today in many small ways, is sometimes like learning how to write all over again. It moves me in indescribable fashion when I can still feel the impact of their words then on my own words today.

//\//\//\//\//\//\//\

©2026 Canute Limarider: All Rights Reserved. This here story was made with these two hands and this one brain on my MacBook Pro. It was inspired by this here prompt:

[embed]The Daily Word #82 Saturday, August 15thmedium.com

If you want a story that’s more purposeful, try this one by Michelle Liew:

[embed]The Department of Purpose TDW #80 — Purpose — 163 wordsmedium.com

And find many, many more right here at #Frequency Change

[embed]Frequency Change Daily stories, wild word counts, and the place you want to be. A pub for fiction, non fiction, poetry, and more.medium.com