The drafting lamp was clamping down forty watts of yellow halogen onto an ugly particle-board desk. It had that tiny, high-frequency hum that only shows up when the clock crawls past three in the morning.
I wasn't trying to draw anything real. No trees, no taverns, no lake cabins.
I just had a stack of heavy toothy Bristol paper and a pocketful of no 2 pencils worn down past their ferrules. I dragged a dull point across the surface, letting the friction buzz straight into my wrist.
Then the shapes started talking to each other.
A jagged frequency that fractured like radio static. Broken semicircles looping into infinite tape reels. Parallel ridges that looked less like mountains and more like the cross-section of a tire tread or an old vinyl groove caught under a needle.
I leaned on the pencil until the lead snapped, smudging the edges with the heel of my palm. I wanted lines that breathe. The kind of raw, kinetic mark-making you’d find on a xeroxed punk zine cover or the inside gatefold of a forgotten prog-rock record from 1974. Pure shape and motion, stripped of all the digital manners.
No literal frame. Wear the noise.
