Have you ever lost an item so valuable, so unbelievably cherished, that there could be no way to replace it?

And was that item also something that would be hugely embarrassing, and possibly incriminating, if someone actually found it for you?

This is the position in which I found myself. My notebook — the one where I write down all my column ideas and anything else I think of — went missing for a week, and I just about died. It’s a red, weather-beaten composition notebook, the kind you see seventh-grade girls carrying around and decorating with pictures of One Direction.

I use that notebook to prune the weeds off my brain. It keeps me from saying offensive things in public (“Well, she probably broke up with you because you’re not interesting at all. But it could also be your hair”). It keeps me from getting into pointless flame wars on Facebook (“What do you mean, Chester A. Arthur was a fool for signing the Pendleton Act? Do you even know anything? Can you read? Are you Hitler?”). Most importantly, it keeps me from writing columns that are just outdated pop-culture references (if I hadn’t found the notebook, this column would have been “Is Charlie Sheen the new Jersey Shore Kardashians’ Bieber?”). Without it, I was going crazy.

After gutting the house to find it, and failing, my wife suggested that I might have left it at our (unspecified religious building) from the (unspecified day of worship) the week before. Perhaps one of the older folks who help to clean the building after our (unspecified religious services) picked it up and placed it in the lost-and-found in the library.

The first thing I thought when she mentioned this possibility was “Hooray!” The second thing I thought was “Oh, boy. What are those old ladies in the library going to think when they look through that to try and figure out who it belongs to?”

Here’s what they would find:

1. An expansive list of the ridiculous names people give their children to make them feel special, including (all real) Jantzy, McQazlin, Bilbo and Meiliya, which in Mandarin Chinese translates to “the beautiful duck.”
2. At least 100 pages of stories from my childhood. There are some pretty dark and condemning tales in this section, including the time my mom gave me a haircut, and afterwards I thought my eyebrows looked too bushy, so I trimmed a giant gash out of one, and then blamed it on my mom’s sloppy shearing when she asked. She still doesn’t know.
3. Doodles of my brothers as robots. There’s no point to these — I just get bored.
4. An expansive list of the flora, fauna, and common surnames of the state of Sikkim, India.
5. A diagram of the story of Esther from the Bible, which shares a page with several ways the earth might be destroyed someday (e.g., crashing into the moon, the swine flu, Paris Hilton is given too much power, and, regrettably, “everyone in the world gets really terrible gas, and someone lights a match”).
6. A 30-item list of different, international versions of the Bigfoot legend, including the Yowie of Australia, the Hibagon of Japan, and the Skunk Ape of the Florida Everglades, which “may or may not just be a large, drunken man with overwhelming body odor.”
7. A mini-essay which argues that, if a calculator were to ever be designed that could effectively divide a number by zero, instead of just saying “0,” the world would implode. Actually, I need to add that to the world-destruction list, now that I think of it . . .
8. A list of obscure celebrities who are easy to make fun of (e.g., Richard Simmons, Billy Gilman, and anyone from the ’80s named Cory).
9. A parody of Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,” which I wrote about feeding my brother to some dogs. Again, I just want to emphasize, old ladies should not be reading this notebook.

My wonderful wife went and picked it up for me the following (unspecified day of worship), and I was thrilled. She said the old ladies in the library were, of course, confused, and a little rattled, but the notebook was fine.

And so, I am now reunited with the notebook, and was able to make a column out of the experience, and the world is safe from my thoughts.

You know, that might be another thing to add to that world-destruction list . . .