nickd doesn't buy a pen
The first thing to remember about buying a pen is that I do not, in fact, need a pen. There are plenty of pens. I have Kaweco AL-Sport rollerballs strewn amongst my slings, packs, and travel gear; they are buy-it-for-life pieces that look better with use, and I have, like, four of them.
And yet there are exceptions, since I am at heart a fountain pen nerd, and the fountain pens are great at home. If you’ve ever been lucky enough to experience my consciousness over a Zoom call, 1) I’m terribly sorry and 2) you probably noticed a Lamy 2000. I journal in the mornings with a matte black Safari. Fine.
We’re not talking about these pens. All of these pens are for me, not you. But sometimes you need to buy a pen for everybody who is looking at you, because people make snap judgments and are, broadly, shallow animals. Here we are discussing that pen, the pen as fashion object, the pen that recognizes that eventually 95% of a pen’s value comes to be the barrel and not the nib. The look of the barrel is the entire game for everyone else. Nobody else is gonna write with this pen, because I’d have to be out of my mind to let anyone touch it.
And the pen needs to enter airplanes, often, so fountain pens are probably out. We don’t want anything exploding on a flight, and we definitely don’t want to run out of ink, either.
So we’re buying a pen as a way of communicating a specific way of being, as signifier, as a possible secret handshake. A pen for meetups, for in-person client meetings, for conferences. A pen that fits the whole rest of the fit. This could be Kaweco, but probably not. This could be a fountain pen, but probably not. (Airplanes, bikes, wearing things hard, have you met me, etc.)
So if we’ve decided to buy a pen, then it becomes fractally complicated in a way that we truly hate. Do we get one of the cool pen startups that cool-flags to the EDC heads? Do we rock the luxe side of JetPens? Or do we just give up and snag an old Montblanc, recognizing that it is the Rolex of pens, the basic-but-money option. There’s a trend of people going old-school luxe these days, and that trend is objectively gross, of course, but it might not be fully avoidable?
Ultimately, we then turn to text, where we go through a glorified journaling exercise with no real conclusion for a thing that we don’t actually need, that might be used only a few days out of the year. Those few days are admittedly high-leverage moments, but still it doesn’t quite matter as much when you have a Kaweco that is beaten to hell, a real workhorse you’ve taken around the world, and maybe you’d just like to talk about it.