I remember a lazy summer Sunday afternoon, in my teenage years.
My mother's Spanish-style strings-and-percussion band was on a merienda break, leaving all their instruments inside the house. They were all outside, in the patio, chatting, eating ham-and-egg sandwiches and drinking tall glasses of ice-cold pineapple juice.
The drum set caught my interest. I had long outgrown my fascination for drums. But I wanted to try out an experiment I made with an ancient set of Staedtler colored pens that had clogged dry before I could use up the colors (because I had forgotten all about them, hidden in my drawer for a thousand years).
I had concocted a mix of alcohol and distilled water, and used a dropper to carefully drip it into the felt core inside the colored pens, trying to revive the flow of colored ink. Then I tested the pens one by one. They seemed to work ok.
The green pen was probably over-inked, since it was making ugly blots on paper. I started doodling with it to remove the excess ink. I liked the feel of the pen, depositing green ink copiously on sketchpad paper. So, on the fly, I sketched the drum set sitting there among Mama's coterie of musical instruments.
Look at those hazures of green ink lines slightly blotting into fine strathmore paper. Don't you just love the feel of it? Green drums... omg...lol. Am I alone in this craziness or what?
If it ain't obvious by now, I'll say it again: I'm a compulsive doodler.
Give me any kind of paper, and give me any kind of writing instrument -- heck, anything that will hold ink for a while until I could apply it -- and I will draw figures and objects and scenes, complete with subtle shading, and often with smart-ass comments and comics-style dialog balloons.
But this isn't the point I want to make now. It is that, to satisfy my compulsion, I often indulge a related urge -- that of collecting, modifying, and fiddling with all kinds of pens, pencils, and brushes.
I think I acquired this obsession in the first grade, when my mother allowed me to mark my school books with marking pen. I became addicted to the perfumy-lacquer aroma of the quick-drying ink. I combined black-and-red marking pens with children's crayons (I had the 64-color Crayola set by third grade).
Also, Mama gave each of us kids our own huge blackboard, and supplied us with white and colored chalk so we could write and draw and play with shades of color, to ease the boredom of long summer days. (We had no TV, much less VCR's and computers, back then.)
Later, my interest shifted as I saw my Mama and Papa use ancient-looking fountain pens in their writing work. A fountain pen looked so cool and sophisticated. So while other classmates were using cheap ballpoint pens, I started using my own fountain pen in fourth grade. And because I was so madly in love with the feel of ink on paper, I started doodling -- on notebooks, on the margins of test papers... Heck, I'd have doodled on all my textbooks and on the classroom display charts had not my teachers warned me against defacing public property.
Soon I graduated into calligraphic pen points, watercolors, colored pencils... then felt-tipped colored pens... then artist pastels... then charcoals, poster paints. And then, in middle school, I discovered Chinese brushes and color sticks. Ah the mystery of a Chinese brush, stiff and erect and bloated with ink... making love to a soft white scroll of rice paper... with techniques that I haven't mastered up to now.
There was no going back. I became totally, absolutely, hopelessly addicted to the utter sensuality of pens and inks. Doodles and sketches began to fill not just sketch pads, but reams upon reams of newsprint, substance-24 book paper... which in turn began to fill up envelops and folders and boxes, clogging up my drawers and cabinets.
It came to a point I was no longer satisfied with regular sketching and painting instruments. I began to experiment with worn-out bristles, toothbrushes, tightly-rolled kraft paper chiseled into fine points, my own fingernails for smudging charcoal... Good thing I hated Pollock, otherwise I would have poured latex paints of different colors on my clothes, and rolled myself onto a canvas wall.
Nowadays, I'm a so-called writer. That's what I'm supposed to do for a living, professionally, and for my political advocacies.
But now, with this blog, you know what my real pathological disorder is. I'm suffering from an obsession, a compulsion, a psychological condition. I'm a card-bearing member of the doodle-and-sketch-forever OCD brigade. In my case, I'm afraid it's an incurable disease. It's going to be the death of me yet.
And it's all my Mama's fault, in more ways than one....LOL.
