Definitely have a problem

In which our Hero doesn’t really have an answer for what his fountain pen does that a 10 cent Bic does not

This was back in the old days, before renewing your Canadian passport got quite so easy. Now you just renew before your old one expires and you’re done but it used to be a much more thorough process with signed photographs and references. I was in a hurry to get a renewal so I could get to a meeting on the other side of the 49th and so I got my pictures taken and found a notary who could sign off on the whole passel of documentation all at once.

Turned out the guy was a lawyer and I was just back from Australia and madly in love with my Visconti Van Gogh and that’s what made the lawyer stop to talk after the work was done. He collected fountain pens, and I thought that was the most laughable idea in the world because having multiple fountain pens was more pens than I had functional hands to write with and here I am now.

My Visconti… well, I’ll come back to it, but for now let’s just accept that my beloved pen is not what it once was. Since then I’ve been looking at alternatives and barely restraining myself from indulging in even more superfluous options than my already pricey taste allows. The real problem was when I saw an unboxing video for the Visconti Pininfarina Carbongrafite (I’ll spare you, Gentle Reader, and limit myself to a picture).

It’s a retractable fountain pen designed by the Pininfarina group, and it’s.. It’s a bold design in a particular direction and that means it’s more likely to provoke extreme reactions. My reaction is that it’s supercar sexy, but possibly impractical. It’s also absurdly expensive for a pen, I freely admit. Between price and concerns about the comfort of the grip design, I’m not able to do something stupid without trying it first.

There’s another retractable design that’s a whole lot less sportscar-chrome-and-sex from Namiki and I find it very attractive, but it has the same issue around grip, where the clip has to rest between your fingers. It could be very good, or it could just not work for me, which makes me loathe to just buy it and hope.

I love the idea of a retractable fountain pen, and I love the subtlety of the namiki. It’s like a little ninja. Just have to find one to touch.

I found the Carbongrafite the same day I discovered I was getting paid for a job I wasn’t expecting anything out of, so I seriously considered treating it as free money and just shopping. Common sense prevailed, but at the same time I felt I deserved a treat (because of all the suffering!) and got myself a TWSBI 580 pen from… well TWSBI, okay? It’s a transparent pen, which is oddly fun and disturbing all at once.

But who gives an engineer diagrams showing how to take a pen apart? I had a new pen for about 30 seconds before I found the diagram, and then I had a pile of pen parts. And who designs a pen that doesn’t just come back together? But no, the center bit that holds the whole damn pen together threads in two directions which means no matter which way I turn things, something is coming undone.

It was ugly. I’m still slightly afraid to fill it, in case something comes undone.

And then there’s my old Visconti, you may or may not recall. It was a beautiful pen with a sultry two-tone gold nib that flexes and flows almost like it’s liquid as I write.

The model was called Van Gogh which led to it being offered in some pretty remarkable colour mixes that are suggestive of the great artist’s works. But I found my attention grabbed by sultry, sexy, slick gloss piano black.

Then tragedy struck. The steel band around the end of the cap cracked away from the rest of the cap, and so I opted to try the lifetime warranty by taking it to my pen guy, who sent it off to the manufacturer.

This is where I had two spectacularly positive customer service experiences and yet left the store close to tears, so great was my heartbreak. The wonderful folks at Visconti saw that my pen was broken, were out of parts in black, and so they just issued me a new pen from their remaining stock. But it’s… this greenish white mixture that suggests jade but… isn’t black. It is *so* not black, and more painfully, it’s so far from a colour that I would have selected.

The guys at the shop saw my face and kindly offered to let me trade it out for one of the Visconti’s in the counter but while they were black, they were also lesser pens, smaller of stature and less grand. And with the new styling of a silver end on the cap.

So I went home with my suddenly fashionable pen and it’s been on my desk depressing my ever since. Now I look at it and it’s still stunningly beautiful. But it’s not me. And now it’s a fashion choice to make for a man who does not do well at fashion.

I think it loses mass just from the change in colour. I don’t know. But look what they did to my beautiful baby!!

Don’t know if it’s mine anymore, but it’s still pretty though.