I carried a three ring canvas binder between classes first year of high school that rubbed against my shirt and pants, stained indelibly a light purple from my doodle drawings on the binder covers front and back in red and blue ink pen. I wasn’t “The Illustrated Man,” but I sure had a tattooed notebook. Alas, there was no time-travelling girl helping me draw. Four years later when I started spending time in Venice, Ray Bradbury was long gone, but I was still doodling.
I wrote in books, marginalia and notes, and doodled in notebooks. I couldn’t sit through a class without doodling. I was never that into comic books, which are more artistic than the common doodle. The beauty of the doodle is that it is not art, and it’s useless criticizing something for not being what it was not intended to be. And I took copious, effective notes in lecture classes; when neighboring students missed a class, they wanted my notes. Bonus the cartoons. There seems to be a relationship connecting the doodling brain to notetaking.
A doodle isn’t automatically a cartoon. Doodling might be likened to automatic writing, where the subconscious develops surreal on a cafe napkin. The doodle may or may not have a model or subject, though often one emerges. The doodle is disposable, like the napkin it’s drawn on.
Job changes, and then involved in business meetings, I continued to doodle, unable to pay attention otherwise. I suppose I doodled like others smoked cigarettes. On the five minute phone call, I could fill a ream. Sometimes, in a meeting, over my arm, someone would notice a doodle and comment. My notes and doodles were mosaic, non-linear.
At some point I started looking at my doodles a bit differently. They went from a means to get through a class or meeting or phone call to a hobby of drawing and sketching, which meant trying to doodle outside the captive occasion and saving them, and turning them into cartoons. But it’s not so easy to draw when it isn’t improvised or made from a distraction, the mind mostly still focused on something else, and captions complicate the process, an attempt to explain a dream.
Maybe doodling is a way of handling experience outside the rules of what children see as the adult world. The doodle is usually not an attempt at representational art, and so the doodler is free from linear perspective requirements. That’s one difference between the doodle and the sketch. At the same time, a true artist like Picasso might have drawn like a child because he had the skill to do so. It’s hard for an adult to doodle like a kid.
Below are some doodled fragments. Click anywhere in the gallery to scroll and view single pics with captions.
lowly sprung the environs plush with dawdle walks and doodle weeds, tweets and posts poking up in the usual spaces, out of concrete poetry cracks, but in the midst of this year’s annual rush for life we were learning to breathe. Spring is just such the perfect answer to winter, one wonders shouldn’t one’s writing change, from Irony back to Romance? Never mind; summer will remind us there is no keener irony, no sharper disappointment, than romance. 
Spring is the enterprise the clothing ads have been predicting since the Christmas ornaments were boxed for the basement. In the liturgical calendar, Lent accentuates the anticipation, slowing the heartbeat to the rhythm of nature. Pope Francis this year clarified that giving things up for Lent misses the point, unless what we give up we give to another. I was thinking of giving up clothes for Lent, but alas, the approaching Spring was simply too wet and cool. To the right we see the doodle remnant of an unseasonably hot spring day, when I broke out the shorts and Susan the muumuu.
inside is stuffy with recirculated dust. You go outside for a breath of fresh air, and there is Cassini taking pics of the ice rings around your heart. The winter cold constricts. The spring cold giggles. Summer laughs. Fall chokes and coughs. One might hold a romantic view of winter, the emptiness, the sleeping squirrels in the sleeping tree hollows, the squirrels quiet for the night in the roof eves. Snow falls from the fir limbs like the down from the mattress when your body is easily the hottest object in the house. Come spring you’ll be dancing in the rain, you sing. But all you do is slip and fall on the mossy deck, the bruise on your leg like a storm on Jupiter.
The Coming of the Toads 