I'm hoping to find a few friends in affliction out there who can help make some sense of it. The phone rings, you answer. You find the nearest writing utensil and start doodling on the nearest napkin, receipt, calendar—whatever's available. In my case, these are never slow, deliberate sketches with purpose. They come from a certain zone—only half paying attention. They are drawn lightening-fast, I never know what's going to come out, and there's never any goal or design in mind.

It wouldn't be much of an issue if it didn't affect the integrity of my phone conversations. But as soon as I'm on the phone, my attention is divided. Not in half, but about 80/20 phone. But that 20% attention given to the crafting of an enormous underbite on a...I suppose it's a legged mollusk...is just enough to require the voice on the other end to repeat itself from time to time. It's not easy picking up every last detail of your friend's upcoming trip to Poland and prior availability to hang when you're staring down at something like this:

When I was younger I would write my signature over an over again—any onlooker might have concluded that I was either a narcissist or a budding young forger. It wasn't about legibility, it was about speed. Today, my cursive signature looks like an EKG reading. That evolved into obsessively writing individual words or phrases culled from the conversation.

There's only one thing that I think I understand about the ultimate progression from words to doodles which took place somewhere around 1993: Signatures and randomly repeated words will never produce a keeper. About one in five doodles survive. There are countless handfulls that I never see until I move and am forced to consolidate space in cardboard boxes. It'll be my legacy.

If you also have this problem, let me know. There might be a subconscious language in all this.

Labels: ponderage