Dark stains on my fingers and my front teeth, illegible, light grey scribblings on a blank sheet of paper, a wad of tissue paper in the waste basket. A sense of humble achievement.
I pick up a box of cartridges and discard it--wrong kind. I pick up another, nod approvingly and, flicking it open with a thumb, empty it into my hand. Ammunition spills over my fingers, cartridges clattering to the floor, but I pay them no mind. I only need one. I slide it into the mechanism--a solid click--and seal my weapon, ready to fire.
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The spare, then, my holdout. Quickly I whip it out, this second, no different from the first but for its colour. It, too, fails me, and I am lost.
Or I would be, were the situation quite so urgent. As it is, I've no adversary in need of smiting. nor am I in danger of being smote myself. But it's important to be ready, and it's plain that I am not. This must immediately be remedied.
I gather my tools and spread them out on the desk and carefully, I dismantle my armaments. I set the pieces apart, on a cloth so they won't roll or slip or otherwise vanish, as small things are wont to do when no-one's looking. I check the cartridges, toss them away and exchange them for new ones. I try again--and again, nothing.
At this point I should make it clear that I'm talking about pens, not guns. The metaphor was nice, so far, but I really can't keep it up. So, pens. Fountain pens, to be precise, implements d'ecriture which I haven't used in a while, having favoured such scribbling tools as the extremely pocketable
Lamy Pico, which, for all its portability, is still just an average ball point pen, and a very nice and super-cheap home-brand 0.7 mm rollerball in a luscious dark blue that looks simply sublime on cream paper. Or, in cases where I'm feeling particularly unsure, a mechanical pencil which is styles after a scalpel, to look
really clever.
I am, you may observe, something of an enthusiast of old-school longhand. It's a craft I haven't practiced much, a fact which has a chicken-and-egg relationship with the very low legibility of my chickenscratch. As a wee lad I spent my modest pocket-money on pens and markers of different qualities, none of which I ever managed to use to depletion, but which I kept organised in my overstuffed pen box at school, systematically employing different tools for different tasks. Of course, it may also be that I was a spendthrift child with hamstering tendencies, which isn't abnormal, who was so geeky as to be unable to think of anything better to hamster than pens.
In gasps and hiccups, my delight in handwriting has resurged in the last few years. The grudging admission that a PDA simply can't function properly as a data entry device for text, even when equipped with a cute little keyboard led to my stomping off to buy a
fucking notebook, and the urge to find the very
awesomest notebook available.
This led me, of course, to the
moleskine. Which of course needed a suitable writing implement to complement it.
Trial and error in shops (the great advantage with having an obsession with stationery rather than, say, vintage cars is that it's a far less costly love-affair) and on-line research showed that, curiously, it was the cheap home-brand rollerball that was most suited to the moleskine's creamy paper, which brought out the radiant gold in the dark blue ink to make the text truly shine, giving the permanent illusion of wet ink--despite the fact that the ink could withstand even a thorough scrubbing with a licked finger, once dry.
I nevertheless kept an arsenal of alternatives at hand, none of which, I'm now ashamed to say, were fountain pens. This was due to the fact that I selected the moleskine particularly for its ruggedness, to serve as a notebook-on-the-road, which could withstand the rigors of being jangled about in a loosely-packed bag all day and still offer the sturdiness to comfortably write in it even without a flat surface to lay it down on. And fountain pens simply aren't the implements you want to use when being jostled side to side on a train or bus or tram, as I so frequently am.
Still, those precious fountain pens beckoned me. Some two or three years old, the both of them, by no means ancient and priceless only in that they cost next to nothing at the time. Plain and nicely weighted, red and silver, and both, it turned out, thoroughly clogged.
Daunted I was not. Off to the bathroom I went with them, with a stash of tissue paper, a glass and (wisely) rolled-up sleeves. What followed was an hour of careful rinsing, patient dripping, a gradual raising of the temperature, drying, soaking... Not of the whole pens, of course, only of the nib, made, as most fountain pens are, of iridium.
A Platinum Group Metal, iridium is hard and brittle, tough to machine, and the most corrosion-resistant metal known. Given that it's also fairly cheap, this makes it an excellent metal for making pen nibs, which (ideally) are permanently exposed to some fluids. This marvelous metal is fairly rare, having come to our lonely little planet either as a sediment from the cosmic dust that constantly drizzles onto our little globe or, more cataclysmically, as a major constituent of some meteorites, such as that found by the Alvarezes in the late '70s in clay around the K-T Boundary, which became one of the major proofs for the theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite.
Ah, but I digress somewhat.
Not that the above isn't interesting--more interesting, at the very very least, than sucking warm water through a fountain pen nib and spitting out the blackened result into the sink. The staying power of that dried, cloying ink, utterly perplexes me.
Of the two nibs, one could be saved; the other, despite my efforts remains uncooperative. The rescued pen is quite weak, still, the presence of minuscule amounts of water in the capillaries causing the ink to be quite pale on paper, but in time, she will heal (the pen is called Martha and is among the few women I have ever loved). Black ink had clogged her veins and I've put her on a diet of blue, so the faded ink is turning slowly from grey to lilac, with blue to follow some time later.
There is something inherently magical and terribly dangerous about writing by hand. There is a finality to what you write that engenders claustrophobia and performance anxiety, for while a well-written page is a work of art, the smallest blemish, the slightest falter can ruin its splendour. Not to mention that it's terribly hard to go back and make corrections. It's only ink on paper, but it might as well be chisel on marble, it's so final and to write anything longer than an essay on a topic you've already worked out, brain-wise, is terribly daunting.
Still. I think I'll give it a go. Just to get my handwriting in shape, and just to train my hand. Should the RSI (or Carpal Tunnel Syndrome) I occasionally suffer from in my right index and middle fingers flare to unbearable degrees, rendering me unfit to type for a year or more, I may have to turn to longhand ad my only alternative.
I shudder at the prospect, of course. But perhaps a year of the musty scent of paper and the satisfaction of black ink-stains on my fingertips is not so bleak a future.
