Great news everyone-- the Creative Reuse Center has moved from a distance that's a car ride away to a distance that's a short walk, and now instead of going once a year, I go every week. I go and prowl around with real riverbank energy, just seeing what washed up in the past few days. Initially I was looking at fabric mostly, but my focus recently has been old pencils, and I find that the search for this type of item is a great way to leave the house for a stroll without incurring costs related to a cup of coffee or an occult book. Here's my haul from last week:

Last Week

Submit Your Suggestions Now - This is a great thing to have printed on the side of a mark-making device. Rookies and troubadours get shit like "Express Yourself", but the true mild reality-definer gets more amped with "Submit Your Suggestions Now"

HAIR FREEDOM - contrast with underground Kentucky noisers HAIR POLICE

Eagle "Chemi-Sealed" Draughting - didn't know that drafting used to be an a-u-g-h kind of thing. Lots of traughic in the late aughternoon. Do you guys have decaugh caughee?

Crayola Violet - just thought I could do for a purple line

General Semi-Hex Drawing 497, 2B - best in show, happy I got a grip of them. Nice dark line. Art pencils tend to go for a circular barrel because it signifies a difference from the pencil you grow up with. But I prefer the hex shape. And I think 2B is my favorite lead, and not just for poetic reasons.

Wickford Appliance & Lighting - If I didn't grow up in New England, would I be obsessed with New England town names? Wickford, Woburn, Peabody, Tewksbury, Athol, Dracut, Woonsocket.... Wickford (Rhode Island) was the basis for the fictional town of Eastwick, in John Updike's novel (and George Miller's film) "Witches of Eastwick".

General "Exercise" 931 - this is bigger than most, for little hands. Feels good.

C.A.B. No. 2 - C.A.B. is "Central Association for the Blind".

I got all of these and a bunch of stickers for 45¢. Honestly I've thought a lot about this and I think the last time I left the house on a satisying errand that cost 45¢ was 1989, when that's how much a Three Musketeers bar cost at Tech Market. In 2026 that's got to be a record!!!!

Are vintage pencils better than new pencils? Honestly, no. There is a quality to old wood that you can really only engage with by shaving off little bits of it over time. And it seems like there are less shitty ones compared to the modern manufacturers, and maybe there's a few gems in there?

OK, I can't lie-- for pure pleasure, a great line, and a really great smell, I'm still reaching for one of these modern numbers:

Mitsubishi UNI, B

or

Tombow MONO, HB

But that said, not everything's about being good or bad. Some things are about leaving the house, or piling up material, or having a slightly different way to engage with a piece of paper, or thinking about typography, or just knowing you're going to read the words "HAIR FREEDOM" every now and then while rummaging around in a drawer over the next 20 years. My promise is to never buy old pencils online. If old pencils stop washing up on the river bank I'll just find something else to look at that's cheap, varied, distributed carelessly, and you engage with it by grinding it into dust. And if the collection gets too big, I'll just sneak them into my friends' homes.

Stickers

OK, here's the stickers I got :)

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links / misc

• Opening NEXT MONDAY in the castle's grand ballroom, a show of photos by Greg Harvester! This is your last week to see the current install, "Cousins and Braintrusts" by Tom Bubul, before it's relegated to archive status via a clever mechanism. That's in the gallery on the second floor of the castle. Take the stairs up and it's on your right.
• I'm going to Minneapolis next week, for 2 weeks, to do an artists residency. I'll be reporting from the road as me and Flan go to the STATE FAIR where she has entered a SCARECROW in a CONTEST. My other two goals are to go to my favorite store AX MAN, and to look down on Minnesota from the plane and see lakes and lakes and lakes and baseball fields and baseball fields and baseball fields. Everything after that is a bonus.
• The Fujichia Feast Society is going strong! To join up, click [here]. Members get the emails of course and also 1 or 2 printed zines per quarter, plus stickers, a paper replica of the castle, a yearly patch to sew onto your flight jacket or memory quilt, and 10% off all Fujichia items!

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