Even $40 Pens Can Be Crappy

My father used to buy my mother watches about every seven years or so for either an anniversary or birthday or Christmas gift from the local jewelers. You could bet that watch would die within a year—my mother worked in dirt and water all of the time, but most of the time some mysterious “watch, stop running” disease would just take over the damn thing and it would die. My mother always made the joke that when she went to Kmart and bought a $20 watch the thing would live four or five years, but the jeweler’s watch would live as long as a goldfish. I actually have the same luck with watches (something in my bones, I swear, stops watches), but now it turns out my mother’s logic applies to pens.

Two weeks in a row I have been to Flax art supply on Market. If you have never been in Flax, imagine Disneyworld for those of us with a creative fetish. The store is about the size of a Petco and has every art supply item imaginable, and then some you can’t imagine. The displays are big and bold and decadent and nearly nauseating with how much there is…and yet they don’t cram it…it just looks like a dream come true. Even the outside of the store is fairy-tale-like, with giant wooden sculpture mannikins and giant pens and paintbrushes and art stuff designed to be visible from Mt. Sutro if so desired.

Flax has a case of pens like a jewelry case when you first walk in and to your right. The pens are strange and under glass. Last weekend I walked in there and picked up a fountain pen called Retro and LOVED it—it was heavy, had the perfect ink flow, and wrote like a dream (without leaks or starting and stopping like the Schaeffer). It was a $40 pen, but it’s refund season, and I felt a need to be spoiled. Some people get tech toys with their refund. I get fountain pens.

This past Saturday I went back again for another $40 pen, from a different manufacturer. It wrote great in the store, but wouldn’t work the rest of the day. (It kept stopping, and to start it the 20th time I lost patience with it and bent the nib…) Flax has a rule about no returns if the ink has passed through the nibs of their pens, so I’m out the money, and have to write with the boring old gel-writer the rest of the day.

The gel-writer that was a $3 model.

And so the watch-saga continues… :)