Doodles

Are doodles still around? I remember my father's little aeroplane doodles. My mother doodled floorplans and women's heads. When my brother was a boy he doodled battleships. I doodled horses, flowers, and abstract shapes. To my recollection neither of my sisters doodled.

I have collected abandoned shopping lists for decades, and even now, though I rarely find any myself, I sometimes open a letter and find a sheaf of lists gathered for me by one friend or another. Had I been writing a list I would've encrusted the page with doodles, but not all, or even most, of my lists are doodled-upon.

Pencils are the best things EVER - there are a few manmade objects that are perfect in every way and the pencil* falls into that elite group. Back at the Lut when I taught the whole school I'd have children (presumably expressing their powerlessness) who would snap their pencils into pieces or deliberately snap the point and grind the pencil in the sharpener until it was a mere nubbin. I'd tell them all about pencils and how lucky we are to have pencils, and request that they think about pencils and not just destroy blithely and unthinkingly. While they thought I was funny in many ways, they did in fact know I always told them what I felt to be true, and respected my passion.

* A pencil:
smells good
makes a wonderful subtle and beautiful mark on paper and other surfaces
is erasable to a high degree
is cheap
is simple
is accessible
comes in many degrees of hardness, thickness
comes in various shapes such as carpenter's pencils
acts to relay the texture of the paper and the crumbling graphite to the hand, brain, and ear
is usable for non-drawing activities when needed, such as a weapon, a poking stick, etc.
many more