Why is it that pencils are what we use when we learn to write? Is it a mark of conforming? Is it a sign to us that we may be easily erased or lose our individuality if we don't adhere to writing the P or the Q or the I with the ideally placed dot?
How many people have become like pencils? The artist who was forced to study engineering. The painter who studied law. The beatboxing champion who is now a doctor. What happened to the pencils they used to write their first words, draw their first cartoon or sketch their first landscape? When I was a child, I remember picking up a pencil and doodling instead of tracing the letters. I remember never having an eye for art. I remember blunt pencils which were never sharpened and exam papers with untidy handwriting which bore the impression of an eraser viciously obliterating a diagram or leaving a word in an incomplete state.
Then the pen arrived and suddenly my life was all blue stains and blotting paper and knocked over inkpots. It was not so easy to erase a mistake then and as chastisement for my mistakes, there would be an angry red mark over the blue - broadcasting my stupidity to the world. The gel pens were equal in torture. I traded ink stains for the ability to chip nibs when I dropped a pen, I traded blotting paper for the last page of a notebook where doodles and scratches dominated the whiteness for the pens had a mind of their own and could randomly stop working.
Pens may be mighty and proof of that is the fact that I've been brainwashed into using pens for everything now. The pencils I'd sworn allegiance to as a child stumbling around the world of words and drawing my first misshapen lines to form a tree don't even rot in a forgotten drawer - it's as if they never existed. If I had stuck to my pencils, maybe I could have been a better sketch artist, maybe I could have done better in geometry and engineering drawing classes.
I now find that I'm starting to leave pens behind too. The addiction of the pre rendered font and the gliding of my thumbs over the QWERTY that's taken over the world seems to be ensuring this. It seems foolish of me to think this means that one day we won't be felling trees for paper because should that day come we will have found other ways to obliterate the fragile ecological balance of the earth.
I wish I could go back and wield a pencil again, to say to it that I am sorry for abandoning it. I wish that I could go back to my gel pens and tell them I'll use them exclusively from now on.
But we all know that what I'm REALLY going to do is use a clipboard program on my device to send this to you over the internet and then lean back and feel entitled that I wrote something original, while the pencils I've forgotten in some drawer in my house weep for the days they were held in my hands and made me confident enough to write the alphabet from #1 to #26 without hesitation
The Bilge Master
