Week X: The pen

I've found the perfect pen. It's a Pentel EnerGel-X BLN105 Retractable Gel Roller Pen in black with a 0.5mm ball. I bought it from the Camosun College bookstore. At first I wasn't entirely sure that it was my one and only, the pen I'd been searching for so long. I'd seen many like it before, boasting of hi-tech nibs and nubs, futuristic gels, strange inks that would confuse most cephalopods. I expected to be disappointed. Instead I was elevated to a higher human form.

About a year ago I went a little crazy. I had to find a better pen. It was driving me to distraction. I was missing lecture and cursing the ink smudges on my hands as the under-performing writing utensils in my bag mocked my efforts at clean lines and legible script. I knew I'd settled. I hadn't found what I really wanted. I was staying in a comfortable relationship with my pens despite my surety that a beautiful new instrument was just beyond the horizon. 

I went to office supply stores and tried every pen but none could satisfy me. I would know immediately. One or two flourishes and I could tell. Sometimes I would buy them anyways and hope that if I took them home there would be some spark, some flickering sign of life, some connection that I hadn't immediately seen. I lied to myself, said that I'd found the one. But when I woke up the next day and rolled over there would be a monster staring back at me from the desk.

My desk drawer is a graveyard. A mass grave. A black hole where unloved pens go to die among spent batteries and zip ties, packs of gum and tissues, packing tape and notepads. I barely gave them a chance before casting them off. The corpses of pens that didn't make the grade. I discarded them with no remorse. I took them home from off the shelves and promised them a better life filling pages and spilling their ink across new generations of notebooks. And then I denied them and threw them back into the abyss.

I still take all my notes longhand. I took over one hundred pages of handwritten notes in one math class this winter. I write many of the drafts and outlines for my blog in my beloved notebook. I love to write and I must have the correct pen, it is essential. I had to find the one. I had to.

I should have known that my relationships with those other pens would never work out. We were wrong for each other right from the outset. We danced around, pretending that we might find a way to resolve our differences, but we knew. We always knew that it would be temporary. My disgust would scarcely be concealed as I sneered at the inferior quality of the ink scrawled across the page. I would furrow my brow and look and understand and we would acknowledge the inevitability. I will stay, you will go.

Then one day I went through the racks of pens at the college bookstore. I tore pages away from their tester pad as I tried pen after pen after pen. There were stacks of triangular cubby holes each housing a different one. Perhaps two dozen in all. The blues and blacks fought for my attention. The finer wider roller super duper glider slider gel pen. Whatever happened to the blue ballpoint that everybody had? WHY DOES THIS HAVE TO BE SO DIFFICULT!?

And then I found the Pentel EnerGel-X BLN105.

The pen. I knew. I hestiated... then submitted to something of a religious experience. A jolt to the senses. It must have been akin to finding Jesus. A clear, cylindrical, Japanese-made Jesus with a 0.5mm tip. When I took its fine grip between my forefingers and thumb and began to stroke a page with its smooth point and its low-viscosity, quick-drying ink, a sensation comparable to hearing the sweetest music saturated my whole system. I experienced the pen. Its black ink left bold flourishes of stain on snow white sheets of paper. Beautiful. Magical. Precise.

You might think it odd to write an ode to a pen. And it is. But 1,000 words is nothing compared to the hours I've spent in the company of my Pentel EnerGel-X BLN 105. My guitar might be the only object I've spent more time holding in the past year. It's a work of art and a tool of my trade and I love it.

I wonder what sort of relationship Picasso had with his brushes. There must be writers who are quite particular about their keyboards. Brian Jacques writes the Redwall series on a typewriter in his garden, like every hipster wants to but lacks the originality to actually achieve. You can't conceive of a world where a religious order of mice do battle with a revolving cast of unsavory woodland creatures and rodents when you're pretentiously sipping overpriced coffee and wearing glasses with the lenses punched out. I really cannot stand hipsters.

I bought a fountain pen when I visited France for a student exchange. Everybody had one and I wanted to be cool. It was yellow, round-tip, 0.7mm. I bought it from a stationary store in Lyon. It was my first genuine experience with a superior writing implement. When I was in grade 9, one of my classmates pulled the ink cartridge out to inspect it and dripped a huge blob of black ink on my khakis.

Now I have my pen and I have my notebook made from a record sleeve and recycled posters and I cannot be stopped. I went back to the bookstore and purchased twelve of these pens. This object that would be the vehicle for all my thoughts, sacred and profane. Then I went to Amazon and purchased two dozen refill cartridges so that I would never experience that sick feeling, that gut-punching sadness that comes when the pen you love dies mid-sentence, and for all your mad scribbling and cursing you cannot give it life.

Word count: 1,007