How a notebook at the bar solved the loneliness crisis

Ladies and gentlemen, I am happy to announce that over the last few months I’ve cracked the phone addiction crisis, the loneliness crisis, and the lesser discussed BUZZKILL CRISIS with one simple addition to my purse: the Bar Notebook.

The premise is simple. It’s a mini navy blue Moleskine I’ve been keeping in my bag for a few months whenever I’m out on the town. Yours can be any color; it can even be off-brand, if you must. Use it for games, theories, doodles. For any conversation where verbal discussion simply will not do, and you need to demonstrate its importance via diagram. It should really be named the Out And About Notebook because I’ll take it to dinners, group hangs, the beach. Maybe a better name, given its eventual contents, would be the Bullshit Notebook. But we’ll be using the moniker Bar Notebook for the rest of this article because, let’s face it, the bar is where my friends’ best and brightest insights appear.

I was originally completely inspired by two friends I was traveling with in February, two New Yorkers undoubtedly swayed by Joan Didion’s “On Keeping A Notebook,” who carry notebooks everywhere they go. Their notebooks are a catch-all for everything: work, journaling, planning, stupid one-off thoughts. They were shocked I, as a writer, do not do this.

On an afternoon when we were (mostly unsuccessfully) trying to chat up a few handsome backpackers on Copacabana Beach, one of my friends whipped out her notebook in order to further explain something to a guy who later became known as ‘Beach Barbie’; he was enraptured. Five months later, they both flew halfway around the world— from opposite hemispheres— to spend a week in GREECE together. This is the seductive power of the little notebook.

Where I break from her philosophy— though I really should be hanging onto every word of advice, given that she, again, hooked a hot Australian into spending a week in Greece with her— is that I cannot mix topics in a notebook.

Like I said, there’s a reason I don’t do this. In January, I got an email to pitch a few fake man-on-the-street quotes about Jeffrey Epstein for a well-known humor paper. I was in the middle of a convoluted trip to rural Vermont, and the only place I had to brainstorm was the notebook I typically use for my engineering job— so now I have a notebook full of professional notes on Jira stories and the like, with one page smack in the middle that has about ten bullets in the vein of “I am friends with Jeffrey Epstein” and “I love Jeffrey Epstein.”

This won’t do. I lie awake at night in fear of losing the notebook on public transit, and a stranger finding this screed that looks schizophrenic at best, criminal at worst. Don’t mix business notebooks and pleasure notebooks. Don’t even mix two business notebooks. You certainly shouldn’t mix drunk notebooks and sober notebooks.

No drunken thought or even clever joke should grace a notebook that also contains the phrase “business logic.” Get a dedicated Bar Notebook.

But anyway, back to the Bar Notebook. How has this actually changed my life? What made my friends, during the sacred morning debrief after a night out at a Wisconsin dive, say “the notebook really was the star of the night?” Let’s explore.

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When I first started carrying the Bar Notebook, it was just an in-joke among my crew. Draw your friends. Draw a character from memory. Draw this glass in front of us.

A lot of the images from here on out are cut off by Substack’s gallery feature but I didn’t feel the need to horrify you with full-sized images of my ramblings; click to expand, if you would like

Eventually, it led to games. Conversations. A written record. What’s written in the notebook becomes a conversation that supersedes the notebook itself. Maybe it’s “are you more feather boa or Guinness shirt,” a personality dichotomy we made up after seeing two people wearing a feather boa and Guinness shirt, or “anyone who’s putting themselves in Cigar-Obese quadrant is Tony Soprano.” (The matrix game, where we come up with a matrix where each spot is equally unflattering and ask people to place themselves within it, is a favorite.)

It’s also good for sketching out concepts, larger ideas that a few vodka sodas have prevented you from articulating.

Isn’t it fun to be able to look back on all the conversations you’ve had? What you thought was worth explaining or saving? You end up with a log of memories that might otherwise be lost to time or a few more Modelos.

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Ideas Guy is not a dating advice newsletter, which is something you’ve hopefully picked up by now. You should NOT buy a Bar Notebook just for the prospect of picking up baddies. But, like many of the world’s greatest inventions, I came upon this by accident: Bar Notebook authors pull.

A few months into my Bar Notebook journey, I had an epiphany: why should the notebook just stay between my little group and me? Why not send this thing around town and see what the amazing people of this garbage bar have to say? It turned out, not much. It turned out that most of them had the same thing, or rather, the same ten digits, to say.

I wasn’t really in a space to flirt it up this night (girls’ night, leaving town the next day, one of them was the scariest guy I’d ever met, etc, etc), which is a shame because I may have unintentionally set a number-getting record for myself, for that bar, and maybe for the world in general as it relates to effort. But it turns out that drunk guys at Wisconsin bars are simple creatures (or maybe they just do not listen very well), and if a girl hands them a pen and paper they will write their number down.

This sounds like advice an out-of-touch mom1 would give when you complain about your shitty dating life. Oh, why don’t you try sliding a piece of paper over to guys at the bar! But, well, it unfortunately works. You should all fear the creature I will become when I am in a number-getting mindset and armed with my little blue Moleskine.

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Okay, so the Bar Notebook has gotten me deeper friendships, a record of my precious memories, and infinite suitors. What else? Free ice cream?

Literally yes.

My close confidante and I were out to a nice dinner and, like two geniuses, were fiercely debating who the hottest guys of all time were: not just hottest, but legendary, enduring, iconic, all-time, generational hunks. This dialectic took over half an hour and the need for the written word was obvious; we had to officialize our draft picks.

As I pulled the notebook from my bag, I made a passing reference to a Reel (sorry) I’d seen earlier that week where a girl said “always journal while solo dining, they’ll think you’re a food critic and bring you free stuff.”

“Maybe we’ll get some free stuff,” I joked, then went back to my argument that any actor who has ever been the buff guy in a Marvel movie should be auto-disqualified for lack of swag.

Sure enough, as the waitress brought over our dessert drinks, she dropped off two unrequested cups of gelato. “It just pairs so well with our espresso martini— I couldn’t let you leave without trying it,” she told us, and, remembering the Reel, I swiped my hand over to cover up the notebook page reading “HARRISON FORD, BAD BUNNY, ROBERT PATTINSON, MICHAEL B. JORDAN.”

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“But can’t you do all this with your phone?” you might be asking. In short, yes, if you’re a lame.

Phones at the bar are a paradox. If I pull out my phone at the bar, it’s because I’m bored out of my mind and would desperately love if someone started talking to me. But whenever I see a person on their phone at the bar, I assume they’re wrapped up in something— calling an Uber, texting their girlfriend, suddenly pulled into work— and would never in a million years talk to them.

My crankiest pet peeve is when a person cuts off a conversation to say “oh, let me just show you.” They whip out the phone and silently scroll for five minutes, only to show me something that they could’ve described in ten seconds. It’s the same if you’re using your phone as a prop; even if you’re showing someone a funny photo, or whatever, there’s something about the phone that signals “I am not really here.”

I’d never go up to a group of people on a phone and be like “whatcha lookin’ at?” But I would, maybe, go up to a group of people giggling about a notebook and inquire. It’s more inviting. It’s not a person lost in their own world.

If, instead of pulling out your phone to Google something for a friend, you pull out a little Moleskine and diagram it out, yes, you might look a little performative2 and feel a little silly at first. Of course. But people are intrigued. They ask you what you’re writing. They go “WHAT IS THAT!” and are charmed by your little notebook. They draw for you, they write for you, they start a conversation. Nobody does that to me when I’m scrolling my texts at the bar.

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I’ve written extensively about how modern tech has made normal social life weirder and harder, and tend to come down pessimistic and disappointed with every new report. I gave the DraftKings bar the fairest shot I could, only to be alienated by five million LED lights; I called anyone with Meta Glasses a pervert, which may have been harsh for some people to hear (though, like, come on.)

This humble notebook, corny and character-breaking as it is to say, has really promoted easy connection in an age where that’s getting harder to come by. It’s a fun little prop to have in your back pocket, and it’s always met with excitement, like the friend who always brings cards or the one saint in the group who brings along a digital camera. I recommend.

In conclusion, if I were more evil and respected my readers less I’d import 400 Ideas Guy branded notebooks from the Philippines and sell them as merch at a high markup. I’m not doing that yet, so you should go buy a Bar Notebook today and start changing your life before I corner the market.

As always thank you very much for reading. Feel free to leave your thoughts on bar notebooks and/or analysis on my handwriting and/or critique our hottest guys draft in the comments.