Peter T. you have done a marvelous job of describing your tools. You have caressed them and flattered them with loving names and poignant memories. You have plunged the depths and left the surface unremarked. But what have you used in this exploration? What have you stained, crumpled up and thrown away?

Did you start with a cheap, corner store diary? Its binding stiff and inflexible, you had to coax it to open. It may even have had a lock with a key that rested in some safe place close to your heart or your desk. In a frantic hurry you would wrench it open to pour forth graphitic meanderings. You held it close and secret until you filled it, then you abandoned it, lost in some lonely, dusty corner of your room, or bound silent in a cardboard box.

What came after? Were these pens and pencils, these women in your life used then to cover page after blue-lined page of three-holed notepaper? Exciting in its dual capabilities for order and anarchy. Arrange them neatly in a binder and you have a story. Then a click of the metal button, a subtle twist of the wrist and they scatter, fall, form and reform themselves through chance and breeze into new orders, easily stirred by the passing footsteps of classmates and strangers, and you have a screen play.

Or did you choose instead to scrawl in the margins of other's works? Tracing the imaginations of published writers to mark your own thoughts on drab pages; highlighting the best parts and leaving the others in merciful oblivion.

What of that frantic time when funds were low and infrequent? Did you use the backs of torn envelopes, old posters and tax receipts;exquisite descriptions of external landscape sprawled over the endless, minute calculations of internal revenue and postage due.

And that last experiment with a luxurious pad of high quality sketching paper. Paper you could sink your pencil into for days at a time, over and over again. Rich, warm paper that distracted you so you doodled and drew and forgot all language in your exploration of its ivory perfections.

Tell us Peter, tell us of the papers that you have used. The wine has got to my head and I want to know.