GRAVEYARD OF PENS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

The gravestones lie, toppled, in the dust of time. Office management takes on many forms. Adding bookcases. Moving bookcases. Filling bookcases. Changing office layout. Cabling. Uncabling. Cabling all over again. Buying office supplies. Storing office supplies. Using office supplies. Keeping an eye on the level of office supplies.
   Once the shelves are in place, yes, they are filled twice. Books go on. Gaps form. Other things are added to the shelves. Items go where they fit. And when they don’t fit, they go somewhere else.
   In short, I had pens all over the place. This is a good thing. Paper is all over the place, too. This is connected to the matter of having pens all over the place. I could pick up a pen in one room and scribble a note there.
   Often, it helps to write a thing down immediately.
   The tragic result of having piles of pens all over the place is that, sooner than you think, the cheaper ones die off. I just gazed across the landscape and saw toppled tombstones lying there. My preference is to use a pen, rather than a pencil.
   Why?
   Pencil fades faster. Scrawl a note you can barely read, and you’ll still be barely able to read it later in ink. The pencil equivalent won’t be there for you, except under lab conditions of the Crime Scene Investigation variety.
   That show was Clue Porn. Let’s film a fingerprint in extreme close-up. We’ll gloss over the stone-cold fact that crime scene investigators don’t interrogate suspects. If you sidestep that apocalyptic crack in the landscape, you’ll get more from your Clue Porn.
   I feel that, when running an office, we must abide by the Rule of Cher.
   If it doesn’t matter in five years…it doesn’t matter.
   I stare at pens. Some I’ve bought. A few are gifts. There are those that I definitely didn’t buy. Perhaps a workman left a pen here, but I didn’t notice for a few days. By then the damage was done. The workman obtained another pen in the meantime.
   Any other categories? Pens that came through the post. These are charity pens, tied to an organisation. Or – the same deal – postal pens from companies who want you to buy their stuff. These companies never sell pens as products, though.
   I gave up mechanical clockwork steam-driven typing and never fucking looked back.
   Once upon a yesteryear, I reduced the amount of writing using pens and pencils. My notes are usually stored electronically. The bulk of my writing is done through a computer keyboard.
   I have the office system set up so that I can type into this computer from any one of three locations in the building. And I don’t mean wirelessly. Office management involves cabling, remember.
   Within the past year, I made an attempt to write out a letter in longhand. I made it as far as a page. One side of a piece of A4 paper. Lined. Let me check the phrase on the notebook. No. I expected narrow feint and margin. The paper I used on the day was wide instead of narrow. There’s not that much difference in it.
   My inability to run a marathon across the written page stems from a shift. Not a shift into electronics taking over the universe. I shifted from writing on A4 paper to A5. This lack of space concentrated my thoughts. And destroyed my Writerly endurance.
   Typing is different. Cutting loose from the sheer toil of mechanical typing, I found myself writing far more on the technically infinite electronic page. No keys to hammer. And no ordeal when shifting to a new line of type.
   Taken together, these factors destroyed my handwriting. There wasn’t much to destroy. If the key qualification to doctoring were abominable handwriting, I’d be a leading expert in the field.
   The restriction of steam-driven typewriters to museums and the more-ethical machine zoos, coupled with my endorsement of the electronic world, added to the switch from A4 notes to A5, killed off any requirement to write long passages by hand.
   I still have much use for pens in scribbling down financial calculations. And pencils have pride of place in note-taking while running roleplaying games. Permanent gaming notes are transferred to paper by pen or typed up for posterity. All the temporary stuff fizzles away in the daylight.
   But writing large sections of text by hand is something I just don’t do any longer.
   When gaming, pencils are useful. I still need pencils. They are required when performing house maintenance. There are pens and pencils for drawing. I use marker pens for handy jobs around the place.
   So I can’t abandon writing implements entirely. What I must keep an eye on is the pen in my pocket when I am out and about. Make sure it doesn’t leak, on my travels. Right now, I have two pens on this desk. One is for writing. The other is for use when the first one runs out of ink.
   Over in the gaming studio, there are plenty of pens and pencils. If a pencil snaps under the strain of taking notes during a game, I’ll switch to a second pencil and sharpen the broken culprit later. These pencils snap themselves. Nothing to do with me.
   What did I throw away? Dead pens. Pencils that grew too short to use in comfort. No stubs for me. I checked the marker pens and they all still worked. That one surprised me. I expected to throw those away.
   There are still notepads from a million years ago, and I chew at those in steady nibbles. I have enough pens there to keep me going, even after throwing around twenty pens and pencils away.
   Some of the plastic is recyclable. Technically, I didn’t throw pens away at all. I dismantled them, and sorted them into the appropriate bins. You can tell the charity pens easily enough. Those never seem to come in black ink.
   I couldn’t tell you the last time I used a pen with blue ink, unless it was a marker pen or a felt-tip for an arty project. Writing? Words? Numbers? No. I’m not saying blue ink was blotchier. Blotchy ink has gone away.
   Perhaps your ink is blotchy. I can’t help you with that.
   Anyway anyway. I thought of how I write as I disposed of implements I couldn’t write with. My method, when out and about, is to remember three things of note. I remember things I see outdoors in groups of three. Should I observe one thing, I hunt for another two of interest to me.
   When I am home, I type up my mental notes. Yes, I carry a pen and some paper with me in case I am overcome by dozens of things I should be writing down. In the office, it’s all about the keyboard. Yes, I occasionally throw a keyboard out. The last one to die lost the letter F key, which disintegrated.
   How the uck am I meant to ucking swear without the right ucking equipment?
   The answer is erociously.
   There is no longer any ritual to the purchase of stationery, of writing implements, or typewriter ribbons. I used to haunt bookshops on rainy days. Go on the prowl in a stationer’s, hunting for really good pens. There’s no nostalgia for the typewriter ribbon. That can burn in a fire.
   How I detest the typewriter. Let me count the ways.
   A good notebook. Nice batch of pencils. A truly excellent pen. Hunting for a bargain. This is stationery porn. And it’s gone. The bookshops are gone. And the dedicated stationer’s is gone, too.
   Given my inability to scribble beyond the vast landscape of an A4 page, it’s all for the best. The graveyard for pens isn’t the bin I threw the ink-husks into. It’s the wider world.
   I should add that I will never develop nostalgia for sharpening pencils. Tedious, at best. And tedious, at worst. Just tedious, through and through. Once or twice, I’d do my own stunts and sharpen pencils with a knife. Laborious. And yet, I felt in control of the results. Those sharpeners that never quite take away the wood on one side of the pencil – I threw those out, too.
   Metal is recyclable.
   Here I sit, staring at lists of numbers scribbled on scraps of paper. All in black ink, as tradition dictates. For that is all that’s left of tradition. The bulk of it is gone to the graveyard. Even so, I find myself writing by hand on a daily basis.
   What am I contemplating? The appendix? It served a greater role, once. And it seems to serve a role, still. Pens and pencils are not yet extinct. They retain specialised functions.
   Do you champion writing by hand? It comes across as Victorian. No. Edwardian. I note occasional plot elements by hand. And financial transactions. Shopping lists that are memorised anyway. I draw diagrams of where to move the bookshelves.
   Handwriting is not dead. Not while I have to move bookshelves. Books are not dead. Though, should a frail shelf fail, books may yet be the death of me.
   The author died, pen in hand, having miscalculated the latest move in a chess-like game of musical chairs involving a bookcase variety known as tall, deep, wide – which sadly collided with a surprised forehead at twenty past the hour of midnight, on that fateful date: a date the author scribbled with a final breath, as a blotchy rectangle of scrap paper wafted by in the gusts created by the accident.
   Rest in Pens.