I believe I have passed as an element of the odd, even to those most akin to me. What I do has become such a food for thought and perhaps would never be considered as simple as the actual action of scratching the ballpoint against a blank page. What can I say, it is a discreet craft. Never flashy and always intangible, writing is. Oftentimes the people and the artists themselves mistake the process as exclusive to the world of academia. I guess it should then entail a confession: I’m by no means academic, really. Never truly an intellectual by any standard, simply as regular as any ink bought from the market. An ex-cofaholic who has now only a trusty pen and a worn notebook to keep me company, oft times under garish illumination of the kitchen fluorescent with the midnight orchestra of croaking frogs and the speeding rain outside, and all these I consider suitable, if not downright romantic, conditions. Yes, these are odd times. It may be because I never got around to giving my excellent Olympia a hard workout to keep its rusting at bay, and due to my not having directly resorted to an electronic notebook when pure genius hits me. I’m terribly old-fashioned.

Take my pen. Ever since I became intimately attached to writing in longhand, I began to particularly favor needlepoints. Point four, with the curious get at the end of the tube. What fine precise lines! On the page, the print would appear to jump right at you yet not dance with unintended blotting. The only drawback was, the thickness of the tube did not quite fit the pen casings other than its own. It was a real predicament as I soon realized. Thus I had to give up the fancy needlepoint and go back to the reliable ballpoint whose tube appears to be an exact fit. Good thing the ballpoints are made quite fine to the point nowadays which made my switch-back truly worth it. Anyhow, needlepoints are strictly for a fiber of a different kind, do you not agree?

I work exclusively with black ink, with clear individual uppercase unless there is a need for me to emphasize otherwise. I used to have this dizzy phallic script in grade school but that never was handy hatching concepts in buses so I settled with this quick staccato penwork and it stuck even to the firmness of my evening bureau.