On Scarcity

Start the clock! Release the kraken! Let the hockey players sharpen their blades, let the audience stir restlessly and go one last time for popcorn and sodas and beer, glorious golden beer that tints the ice with its microbrewed haze.

Because there is a haze tonight, that’s for sure, folks. Tonight Seattle’s surrendered to the supernatural forces that have been creeping up like uninvited shoggoths in recent years. The world’s gone weird and wacky, and why not krakens, why not tentacles spilling out from the Space Needle, infesting the sky? It’s Seattle, after all; it’s raining so it’s not like they block out the sun.

Who’d have dreamed that magic and hockey would mix this way, a mash-up made of bloody sticks and smashed spell bottles? Seattle’s wizards have come out of hiding for this game, emerged from their lairs in Greenlake and Mercer Island, driven their Teslas over to park in interdimensional folds where they won’t get scratched like normal cars.

Only an hour’s worth of game, and then the magic runs out, deflates like a sodden pumpkin, milked for all that tentacle and terror juice. Will it be enough to keep Seattle entertained for another evening, keep it from imploding like Scherezade in reverse into ennui and coffee beans? Cities don’t resort to supernatural hockey games until they’re really in extremis and no one is really sure what this one will – or even can — achieve, given a world of murder hornets and sapient bananas and well, you remember the last few months as well as I do, particularly what happened to the butterflies.

The clock’s ticking. The skaters are moving back and forth over the ice, and things are stirring in the depths underneath it, things that will fuck a Zamboni up and shred ice like tissue paper. That’s how close the danger is to us all. That’s how dire things are.

Let’s stop now, before another spray of ice goes up, before another player gets a bloody nose and melts the ice with that, so things can crawl through from another dimension. It’s not too late. Where’s the entrance? Where’s the exit? Why does this ice hold me so fast?

I do a good bit of writing by hand, usually in a large hardbound sketchbook, although I sometimes like the feel of a nice narrow yellow-lined pad or the sprawl of an enormous expanse of drawing paper. And to write on these, while sometimes I’ll wander over into glitter gel pens or fine-point felt tips, my favorite is the Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pen.

Depending on where you’re getting it, the price varies from $3-10, with the high range of that usually appearing in fancy stores aimed at writers, which will strategically place a mug of them near that stack of leatherbound, gilt-edged journals locking with tiny moon and star clasps whose splendor will prove so intimidating to live up to that you will never actually use it. Overall, it will prove much cheaper to buy yours at an art supply store, which is where I get mine, since I go through at least a few each month.

I like writing with this pen because it never feels as though the nib and paper are dragging at each other. The nib could best be described as medium, somewhere well between broad point and narrow. The pen comes in a variety of shades and shows clearly what color it is at both the top and the bottom. For me, the availability of the color depends on how recently the store’s restocked, but the web tells me it comes in black, navy blue, red, green, pink, purple, and turquoise blue.

My only quibble with the pen is a small one that may not apply to many people’s experience. I am tough on pens. They end up jammed in purses, pockets, lost in coat linings, moved from one book bag to another. And so if your treatment of your possessions is overall gentler, which it probably is, you may not experience the same results I do, which is that about one in twenty pens ends up not exploding so much as getting a bit drippy to the point of ink-stained fingers.

You can read this review at http://thegreenmanreview.com/what-nots/making-words-flow-with-pilot-varsity-fountain-pens/