It’s the new year 2022. I’m freezing in my garage lounge smoking a 60-ring gauge cigar and loving every minute of it. My leg feels like it’s on fire due to the circular heater on the floor. And my face is beginning to solidify being exposed to the frosty air that surrounds me.
And even though I have my favorite pen in hand, I’m not writing. I’m listening to Joe Cocker on YouTube thinking about the snow that’s building up and how much of a pain in the ass it’s gonna be to shovel it. But I can’t get my Schneider® off my neuronal, glial, and endothelial cells a.k.a. brain matter.
“Quality is not an end in itself. The point is to launch writing instruments with characteristics that allow the users to integrate them naturally in their everyday life – to make them subtly more comfortable and better.
“Therefore, we are consistently working on technical innovations, which improve the writing characteristics of our instruments. These include the Viscoglide Technology for smooth and gliding writing, the LiquidInk Technology for an extremely even ink flow, or hybrid tips made of stainless steel or elastic-plastic for particularly soft and pleasant writing.
“We want to monitor our manufacturing process at any time so that we can continuously optimize it to guarantee the high quality of our products. Therefore, we develop and manufacture exclusively in Germany – which can be seen by the “Made in Germany” on all our writing instruments.” (schneiderpen.com w/grammatical errors corrected)
Ok, so another facet of my private life that has found a leak in my inscrutable penchant for privacy. Isn’t that contradictory? I protect my privacy but since 2014 when I started writing these essays for the blog I’ve become more transparent as the years go by. A conundrum.
OK. So I have a passion for pens. All kinds. I own pens by Moneverde®, Pen & Gear®, Pilot®, Woodsworth & Black®, Lamy®, Papermate®, Pelakin® and a plethoria of other gel, rollerball, fountain pens, a few Bics®, and even ordinary ballpoint pens.
Some are rather expensive and others are not. But the Schneider® is the standout modern-day quill of my choice. But all and all, I must stress, ALL of them use black ink. My choice in ink color is some shade of night be it in the dusk or midnight variety, throw in squid ink and even that pales to cover the estimated 18 decillions (the number 1 followed by 33 zeros) of shades of this primary hue.
The blackest of black was Vantablack® because it absorbs 99.96 of light. But today, the latter takes second place to MIT’s discovery of Black 3.0 which absorbs 99 percent of light. And for all we know, black is, by some, not even considered a color at all. Although it is without a doubt the most common of all ink shades.
Why is my predilection for black ink, and not blue – which is considered to be the most widely used color of ink simply due to established conventions – so stalwart? Simply because – I can see it – clearly on paper. And the Schneider One Hybrid N® .5mm seemed to be the only one that offered my preferred shade of black ink plus my obsessive thirst for scribbled sharpness on paper. Plus from what I could see of the pen’s shape it would fit the form of my hand neatly accommodating my crooked-shaped little right finger.
So to wit, this sky-blue writing utensil was a chance purchase I took when I ordered it off the internet for under $5 (depending on how many you buy). Cheaper by the dozen, (right Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, who, with her younger brother, made the phrase ubiquitous in 1948)?
As I readied to return to the kitchen, I thought that pens are a bit like cigars, yet also akin to freshly mixed egg salad. It’s still snowing. We were going to order take-out because I abhor delivered food – even pizza. So we decided on Glasgow salad sans celery – the latter our son’s choice.
As I was mixing the chopped eggs into the mayo and adding the granulated onion using Julia Child’s method of measurement (the palm of the hand), and squirting in the rough ground mustard (usually called deli-style) – I did so gently because that’s the secret to fluffy and a luscious egg salad’s simplicity – the whirl of words that I had in my head for an essay while listening to Joe, (as I put the cigar in the ashtray, and the pen in my pocket, and turned the heater off), were warmly worming their way into my churning mind about how closely the Hybrid N® rollerball classic, et al. can be so much more than just writing instruments but indeed own a remarkable similarity as to how smokers choose their cigars.
We take a chance. We go for it. We don’t know what it will really taste like, burn like, smell like, or like like – but we sense that the odds for error are rather minuscule so we just buy it, i.e. we gamble on not finding a bubble in the flow of ink, a shell in the egg salad, or a plug within the filler. We just hope for the best.
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If you’ve read this deep into the essay, I applaud your curiosity – and intellectual intrigue – that pens, fresh egg salad, and premium cigars have so much in common that it’s surprising to me that no one has written about this triumphant trio before.
IrvCigarBroker 