Pencil

So my big dilemma today is whether to write something. I was going to write something every day, and make a picture, but yesterday I wrote two pieces since I was in an all-day writing intensive. So I could take a day off.

We read a poem about a pencil. About all the poems that are in a pencil. I remember when we had John Grimes (https://id.iit.edu/people/john-grimes/), an early computer graphics champion, come to talk at our college in St. Louis. He held up a pencil and said, “We’ll never have anything more sensitive than a pencil.”

I’m not sure if he’s right, but it is a pretty amazing instrument. NASA supposedly spent a million dollars to develop a ballpoint pen that would write in space but finally settled on a pencil that worked as well.

What interests me more is that we have stuff inside us that needs to come out. If we don’t let it out, then it dissipates… vaporizes. That’s why I’m writing today.

P.S. This is drawn with a ballpoint pen.