I have a lot of problems with pens. They range over a surprisingly wide field off issues. Pen selection is a big one, one I'm sure everyone who does any actual writing encounters quite frequently (and don't think I'm not embarrassed that I feel it necessary to talk about this. Pen selection? That automatically implies that there is some use of paper in my life, which is just not where I want to be. I remember there was a time not long ago when the need to write something on paper was so infrequent in my life that the process of finding a piece of paper on which to write that thing took nearly 10 minutes (and that short a period only because I didn't mind writing things in the margins of my copy of Moby Dick - the only thing that lifeless tome is good for [n.b. me saying that is a little disingenuous, since I've never actually read the book at the way through. The scribbling in the margins of my copy always put me off. Note also, though, that the lack of erudition displayed by my not reading the book does not keep me from making "Call me Ishmael" jokes at every opportunity]).

These days, I cary a notebook with me where ever I go (a habit I last had when I was in high school, and hadn't yet realized that no one was interested in reading just how very tortured I was [not even myself, either at that point or now, from the vantage of a few more years experience. Seriously, the stuff in those journals are so incredibly embarrassing that the only reason I keep from burning them is because the purity something acheives through fire is positively baptismal in it's power, and those pieces of dreck just don't deserve it. I'd just throw them out, but they might end up being incinerated and I don't want them to have the satisfaction]).

[I'm sorry, I just started paying attention to what you were writing. Did you just suggest that the reason you keep your journals in the closet is just to spite them? - ed Yes. No go back to whatever portion of my conscious I keep you]. (hey - does my ed reside in my id? That would be so huge). (I just looked up 'id' in the OED. It says that [among another definitions] it's a unit of idioplasm. I think in my case, that's missing a 't').

But I was talking about pens. It takes me a really long time to select a pen, since not only is there a very specific style of pen that I like, but I also have no idea what it is. I mean, I have the basic shape of it, of course (cylindrical, pointy at one end, black ink, good flow), but I don't really know the make and model. Which, even if I did, wouldn't help, since I don't think I've ever gone into a stationary store and seen any overlap between the styles of pen available at that store and any store I'd previously been in. And I'm really picky about it, so I invariably spend a bunch of time in the pen store, looking at pens and trying to guess what using that pen would be like, based on the look of the thing (and occasionally the description of the pen from the box. But I've found that the description on the box bears about as much resemblance to the actual pen as most personal ads have to their author. Sure, they describe some person (pen) in potentia, but to suggest that description has anything to do with the reality of the situation would be willfully ignoring a lifetime of eating Milky Way bars as an early-morning treat (I'm not sure that worked as an analogy, but you get the picture).

Another problem I have with pens is that I exhibit inappropriate behavior with them. Nothing obscene, surely, but I really shouldn't be doing pen flip tricks during meetings, since my pens have a tendancy to fly across the table onto my manager (also, how amazing is the internet that I just linked to a page that has downlaodable mpgs of pen flip tricks. That was one google search, folks).

Another problem with pens is that my pens explode all the time. This is probably a direct result of the pen flip tricks that I do, since all that is doing is creating some force internal to the pen that pushes the ink up into the tip, seriously screwing up the flow. And the fact that I like the gel-ink type pens makes it worse - they have a very nice writing flow because they use a significantly less viscous ink. This means that the ink comes right out of the tip, all over my fingers, shirts, sandwiches, and managers.


Also - dear god. I've yet again taken what is easily the most powerful medium on earth today, and reduced it to something banal and void of any value. There's a special place in the afterlife for people like me (see you in Hell, Larry Flint!)