Lines, squares, squashed circles and triangles: that was the more-or-less extent of my repertoire in the beginning. In combinations I'd draw them to make ships, creatures, buildings and people. Ships of four lines and a circle would shoot lines into triangles with two squares, destroying them in a scribble. Lots of scribbles. Those were the other shape I could make. Flashforward some years, to birthdays with big numbers like eight and nine, and simple innovations like curved lines and overlapping shapes had led to an explosion of possibilities: stick figures became blob figures with their blobby heads and hands, and for no outwardly apparent reason, scraggly rocks and jagged wings started cropping up everywhere: I was learning. Most definingly, however, was that with the help of a book–and with overwhelming satisfaction–I drew recognizable Pokémon. Not a lot, but Diglett, Dugtrio and Voltorb now flew en masse from my hands. This was my period of illustration triumph, where the reassuring forms of basic geometry wielded as multi-tools. Indeed, it was so successful that the triumph persisted until it had to be called a golden age: third grade had given way to fourth and fifth and now I brandished not only an increasingly discernible blob-people, but a Mudkip, many Pikachu and a sloppy army of boxes in single point perspective.

Drawing. My relationship to that imposing word at the time was rooted in the casual philosophy of doodling. That meant that I had never thought much of drawing, forged no connection to it but that which suited me. It could be said that doodling preaches, "draw for entertainment, when you feel like it." And for me, that was drawing–no, that was elementary school in a nutshell. Whatever you like, when you feel like it. I wasn't exactly studious, even by elementary school standards. That may be hard to believe–how hard is elementary school?–, but my family sometimes recounts how I had no interest in learning how to read. So I refused to learn, rejected until my friend was reading Harry Potter and suddenly the other side fell out. He was lightyears ahead! Now that was a good reason to learn how to read. After all, I remember how embarrassed I was that he could rattle off the alphabet and I couldn't. My teacher told my parents "I've never seen a child make progress so quickly." My mother asked me about it and I informed her "I don't know all the words but I pretend that I do."

From near the end of this blithe, doodling nutshell of a golden age, when life felt like it could go on forever and I had long achieved basic literacy and more recently risen to academic engagement, I draw a memory: stepping into the art room with its line of sunlight-streaming, up-above windows. It was in that warm and plain place, flooded with natural light, that fifth-grade I confronted for the first time a kind of drawing that was not doodling. They called it a portfolio. More specifically, they called it "copy this print of George Washington Crossing the Delaware and use it for a portfolio if you want to apply to such-and-such school-of-the-arts for middle school." The painting and the portfolio aspects were imposing. You can copy this? I thought in surprise, trepidation. This was a new realm, a conception of drawing that I had never presumed. And the other fifth graders were nodding and talking about their portfolios like it was a matter of due course. It wasn't just the painting, these kids were imposing too!

So I left the arts room that day a bit frazzled. The print was difficult to copy, more difficult than anything I'd attempted: ordinarily I'd just leave it be. Too hard. I'd told myself previously when I'd previously ventured to copy something around me. A pen, for example. But those kids were chatting about their portfolio pieces and it was class or club or whatever, so I had to draw. Thanks to that, George ended up entrancing me and I left him that day feeling I wanted more of George, more of this upswelling within myself, the beauty that unfolded in my eye even as I re-erased my copy. To this day I can picture the rowers and the boat of that painting, taste the sensation of drawing them. Something about the day touched me deep. Too hard. I told myself again, and that was the end of drawing that painting. Or not quite. I brought it up to my mother thereabouts, just one of those topics that falls in sideways while speaking. "Huh? You want to go to such-and-such school-of-the-arts? You want to become an artist?" She pressed me.

"W-well, not really." I had just thought the drawing was fun. Engrossing, in fact. But now she had raised the stakes, taken the fancy of those kids and amplified it tenfold: I certainly didn't want to become an artist! That would be like becoming a poet, or a potter. I mean come on. My attitude at the time walled off certain professions, I saw it like that there were real jobs and then there were joke jobs and potters were undoubtedly the latter. Astronaut. Quantum physicist. Now those were real jobs, I had thought. Still are real jobs, I reckon...I'm still apprehensive about professions like 'artist.' With a physicist, for example, there's a certain level of competency. You need math, you need imagination and then you look at art and everything's all over the place. You splash paint drops on a canvas? Neat. So anyways I ended up with a second session with George because I wasn't a primary school delinquent, but I couldn't get into it at all and felt frustration first and last and foremost. That frustration was to be a theme, but then fifth grade ended or I wandered off to do something else during that time–I don't really know, but that was the end of George.

Come middle school and then middle school ended: I accrued a dog, a bucking bronco, a menagerie of really cool looking–yet fundamentally diseased–eyes. But after I'd accepted the English language vis-a-vis alphabet during elementary school's first half, I'd become a bit of a reader in fourth and fifth grade. Ok, a big reader. That predilection was a bud that blossomed in middle school, and in this middle school period which was a decline in my visual arts, like the neoclassicism that followed Michelangelo, I fell into endless treadmills of words like The Wheel of Time. Memorably, the middle school principal stopped me when I was walking through the corridors with a thousand page book. This book was a showstopper, he got looks wherever we went. Look how smart I am. That was a big part of my seventh grade ego. "What are you reading?" He asked.

I showed him the cover. "Nothing much." It had been The Way of Kings, a fun book–but I stand today by the evaluation I gave the principal, with a little less of the urge to look smart then I had at the time. Apologies Mr. Brandon Sanderson, but all you did was improve Elantris. The shard stuff is good, but it's not enough! You're not writing a web novel, you know. Anyways, being the big-brain bookworm that I fashioned myself, I spent a bit of time in the middle school library. Now, you might think that I was tearing through books in there, which is exactly what I had thought I'd be doing–but you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. Because pretty soon I'd discovered something that could match books at every turn. Manga. Dragon Ball. "Check it out!" A friend had told me, and there went a hundred plus hours of waking life. Whether it's a general feature of middle schools, or because the one I attended offered Japanese classes, we had a full set of Dragon Ball (and Z, obviously), some Fruit Baskets, Full Metal Alchemist, Bleach and etcetera. The others were OK when I got around to reading them, but I read Dragon Ball (and Z, obviously) half a dozen times through. Wow. Step aside, Mr. Sanderson.

So one day I was quite naturally laying on the bedroom floor, which I always did instead of sitting, revisiting an early volume of Dragon Ball–four or five, perhaps, and I got it into my head to copy the cover art. It looked incredible! I wanted to make something nice looking myself, so I got out the scrap paper and pencil and maybe a file folder to draw on–I was still laying down, by the way. Well, needless to say, that was an hour and a half of hair-tearing for my confused head. I couldn't understand why it kept coming out so poorly! The next day. Maybe I'll try again. I emerged from the copy session not just confused and frustrated, but angry. Oh, that one is kind of alright. I considered. No! It's awful. I concluded. So Dragon Ball was the closest I came to another Washington in middle school–I don't think classic art keeps many kids drawing.

Come high school and this pencil affair is a moot point: the landscape of life has drastically changed. There was no drawing in high school. Except. Senior year rolls around and the sequestered spring semester is finally found. January turns to February turns to March. It's 5 a.m. and the dimmed lights give off their characteristic buzz, amplified because my ears are always more sensitive when I'm tired: dark rings wrap my eyes. Ordinarily I'd have another hour fourty-five of sleep, which would've made seven. But six years later, nevertheless, here I am at a table. And you know, I didn't really enjoy 'drawing'–only doodling, which had been years ago by now. Drawing is always frustrating, I felt at the time. And I had to drive to school–I didn't want to kill my sister in a sleep-deprived stupor (a possibility I worried about from time to time in those latter high school days). But there I was, trying for all I was worth to draw figures on quickposes.com.

Drawing through the end of spring semester was the highlight of that year. In advisory we'd been asked to draw what we thought our lives would look like after graduation for parent-teacher conferences, and I drew the backside of the car I drove–a car which gifted us two flats that year, thank you. The principal (filling in for my advisor, who was on maternity leave) asked me what it was. "It's me leaving school." I said, shrugged. I explained it was my car, driving off campus. Self-evident, to say the least. My father shrugged, too. That's all it was, self-evident, an obvious portrait. So I was glad I kept drawing. Kept drawing after high school graduation too, until college rumbled to life in August and I fell off in October.

And that is how I found myself embedded in a northern winter that can't be matched at lower latitudes, because it's months without sun and colder, drawing some stupid building with frozen fingers. Snow would keep blowing onto the paper, I'd keep getting colder–come on! So eventually I found myself hunched up in a study room ten hours a day on weekends...and sometimes weekdays, to be frank, desperately trying to work through the perennial classic Fun with a Pencil. Fun with a Pencil were some of the roughest months of my life. I did my freshman year at a university up north, in case I haven't mentioned it.

Now the calendar sweeps another cycle, earth returns to the same point of orbit. Geometry is blurring with form, copying may somewhat be supplemented by a kind of drawing imagination...I don't really enjoy drawing, but I guess I'd call it a hobby right now. To my left I've got a stack of maybe fifteen hundred pages, drawings from the last couple of years. A lot of the middle school stuff is in a folder somewhere. It's all nice to look at, once in a blue moon for the recent stuff, once every few years for the older stuff, to see the increments in progress from afar–which is the only way I can make it out. It's amazing how the mind of the illustrator just isn't in me Very little excitement in laying pencil to paper, but meager persistence brings its own meager rewards. Each day bears down like an inch in a marathon...how many more are left?

A lot.