So I just bought a new pen. Why is this important? Because it is not just any pen. I bought a German fountain pen made by a company called Graf von Faber-Castell. This purchase was something I had been aspiring to make for months. I felt I needed the right pen to write. I was correct, this shiny silver pen, made me write this.
After my purchase I went to go see Lila. Lila is a friend of my wife’s and an amazing Chiropractor. So as I was laying there on this amazing stretchy table, that hypnotically goes up and down, bending like a drawbridge, loosening up your back for the eventual crack. That cracking sound for me carries with it the promise of relief. Which is just a fleeting moment of no pain. As I waited for my reward, I wondered to myself, because the only person I wonder to is myself. Which is a shame, because there are times that I wish I had somebody else to wonder aloud to. It was only last month that I admitted to my wife that I tell myself elaborate stories. These stories have been a staple of my life since I can remember.
When I say stories I mean ongoing narratives that span months and in some cases even years. They contain continuous plots and characters, along with my hopes and fears, my dreams of a better tomorrow, or the ability to rewrite the past. For some reason it is where I feel most comfortable. My mind is for the most part a safe place for me. There are times when that is not the case, where my mind is dangerous and dark, but it has not been that way for a while now. Though I know the darkness and fear is always lurking, trying to return. There are times I wish it would, I want to explore it, like a caged animal, not release it, but come to know it better. My mind had moments where it worked so much better and faster with the darkness. But also there with the darkness, were times when my mind had trouble distinguishing which reality it occupied, those where the extra fun days.
Quickly, my wife has never since that day, when I told her I live partly in a land of make believe, mentioned it or brought it up. I assume that she does not even remember I said anything, which is strange because it seems like something a wife would or should remember. It seems like type of thing one would make a mental note of when they heard it uttered. Maybe she is just not interested. Even though I think it is something she would wish to speak to her husband about! I would certainly paint a different picture of my pastime than I did above if she did ask, I would not want to alarm her. I do not think there is anything to be alarmed about, but nonetheless I would invent a new reality. But I digress.
What I was thinking of while prostrate on Lila’s table was about my new pen. I love having a new pen, it makes me feel like a writer. I feel as if I am a true professional. But as I write more and more with this fine piece of German craftsmanship I think I might want a finer nib. Maybe I am not a medium nib kind of guy. It seems too large, too sloppy, maybe this moleskin notebook just has crappy paper. Maybe I need to buy a notebook of expensive paper? It could be that my fancy new German, pen needs fancy German paper. The medium for recording my thoughts is important, even though my thoughts are only important to me, well at least sometimes they are important. Other times they are nonsense.
That thought though which has spawned the previous prattling needs to be asked. Does a pen make a writer? Or does a writer make a pen? I do not think that a writer can be a writer and use anything other than pen and paper. I assume I am wildly mistaken in that belief, but I choose to believe it anyway. I know from my limited experience that all books or articles end up on a computer, but I think the beginning must be found where paper and ink meet. It just seems more natural to me, like the proper way nature intended writers to write. But like most of my pontificating it is not based on facts, or anything that is outside of my reality, because I have never written anything of substance. Not that I do not write things, but nobody has ever published anything or nobody has even ever expressed interest in or asked me to write for money. Except my boss he is paying me to help him write some articles and a book but we have not written anything so I am unclear if that qualifies as classifying someone as a writer.