As I do not get very many visits, I have had to develop lots of other wood strategies. I soon gathered up a bunch of wooden pencils. When you hold several wooden pencils in your hand you have, albeit in a somewhat fractured way, a single board of whatever you want to imagine it to be. Because I write a lot it was not long before I had worn all of those pencils down to nubs. When I tried to purchase more of them from the prison store, for reasons not entirely clear to me, I learned that wooden pencils are no longer sold.
Plastic pencils are all they sell nowadays.
Some time ago a cracked broom was sent into the cell block. When I accidentally dropped the broom while sweeping out cell 51, a small piece from that crack broke away. I turned the broom in, and went back to the cell. I picked up the small piece of wood, and closed it tightly in my fist and sat down on the bunk. I saw myself in the mirror of my mind's eye and for a moment I felt like a crying infant whose parents had just shoved a pacifier into its mouth.