Ode on a Mechanical Pencil

Writing is a process of processing and the / a key to processing that process is, for me, to work with a mechanical pencil, to embrace its graphite smear across journal pages and the marginalia of the previous day’s markdown print-out and the side of my haggard southpaw; it slows me down to an essential slowness that creates the illusion or the reality that the day, as Leonard Cohen said, hasn’t gone down in debt.