One of my favorite pens: leather with Swarovski crystals

In the morning, I use a dark wooden horsehair brush to provoke lather from a disc of soap in a wooden bowl on my counter. The soap smells like cinnamon or cedar -- I've yet to decide which, maybe both, but spicy. I then shave with a steel razor whose blades I change biweekly, on the same day I buy groceries for the following two weeks. (The three-bladed razor has a single-bladed brother beside it whose use is unclear, but they were a package deal.)

All of these were gifts from Amber, the razors months ago and their accouterment on subsequent holidays, most recently my birthday -- through given early because I had exhausted the previous soap, and it seemed silly to deprive me of them. Amber's logic was that the razor would eliminate the plastic waste of disposables, but I used few if any of those in a given year.

Often in first drafts or when I am pressed for time, I write longhand with one of fifteen fountain pens, some costing a day's wages when I was a substitute or old enough to have birthed me. Are these pens objectively better than your cheap plastic Bic? They require regular infusions of bottled ink, the feeding process requiring unscrewing, twisting, pulling, squeezing, and disassembling (depending on the pen). Before it runs out after ten pages and needs replenishment, the ink is prone to bleeding or smearing when introduced to any moisture, such as sweat and tears. They are more instruments than implements, requiring care. You don't have to soak a Bic in a slightly acidic solution every few uses to coax out the sediment of dried inks.

So, yes. Superior because they feel organic, as though one were writing with a hummingbird that might deadpan to the camera that it pays the bills. One forms an attachment and gets to know the pen's eccentricities the way one knows a cat's peculiarities. I have a spreadsheet of what ink each pen likes -- and I assure you that they have preferences that make themselves known in the spottiness or scratchiness of the lines. (Some of my ink is more expensive, permanent, and therefore inclined to be difficult; some of the pens have airtight screw tops that can keep the ink wet, whereas others will dry out if put down for a few days and need a tender droplet of water in just the right place to find their flow once more.) What I write with a fountain pen is not what I would put down in the unctuous ink of a standard Paper Mate. (Fountain pens with their sharp-looking nibs are likely forbidden at my secure facility, so I get time enough with disposable pens. Most of my fountain pens could also stand to be stabbed into an artery or two with a proper grip. Only one is transparent plastic and might therefore pass muster.) The more one uses a fountain pen, the more the pen learns and accommodates one's stroke and pressure through the minute shaping of the nib. Computers so often prove a distraction in a way that pen on paper never can. A fountain pen activates another corner of my brain. I can fall into a flow state with a fountain pen, though I am not sentimental enough that I don't have at least one other in arm's reach in case the active pen runs dry. I even try to have a few humble notebooks squirreled away in my writing nook if I fill one during an intense session.

(This does not imply that I do not type all my notes into the cloud using one of four devices. I am a romantic about these things, not a Luddite, and must edit and publish digitally.)

A fountain pen is an intentional device. Not all are pricy, but even hearing that I have spent ten dollars on a pen startles people. ("Yeah, but I don't throw them away! I can refill them forever ...Please ignore the dozen others. I use them too. It's still better!")

The joy in these objects is how low tech they are (also that metal of the pens and razor are metal and, with proper care, could survive me).

The inconvenience grants charm and effectiveness to both razor and pen. It is the ritual that provides meaning and context, intentionality. Also, shaving with a proper razor is faster and more thorough than my electric one. I would say that it gives me some moments of contemplative peace each morning, but I shave while dancing in front of the mirror, listening to murder, politics, or comedy podcasts on my Bluetooth earphones. I am nothing if not inconsistent. Short of having someone read to me while perched on the edge of the bathtub as I apply a coconut butter salve to my face, I am incapable of being old-school about my entertainment.

This perhaps preciousness for seeming antiquity extends only a few other places. I always have a tiny notebook with a leather cover in my right front pants pocket -- the cover is removable, and the notebook is usually tossed unceremoniously into the recycling bin upon being expended. 90% of the books I read are on my Kindle, even though Amber's and my combined library must contain over a thousand books occupying multiple bookcases on two floors. We rarely prune our collection, though Amber occasionally reorganizes them. (She reads far more print books than I do, primarily to build a skill or merely because her books of necessity tend to be more graphically dense.) I use books for research and quotes, so being able to snag my annotations as a text file helps, to say nothing of editing my drafts in there. If I stuck to paper, these things would not be possible -- or would be far more labor-intensive.

In most other aspects of my life, I do not have the space for what is almost old-fashioned -- though I can acknowledge that, as I am not taking a straight razor to the neck, it's not that antiquated.

Using something unnecessarily beautiful and refined for a mundane action elevates it. Perhaps not enough to justify the price to most -- even to myself -- but it is a lasting object. I become familiar with its shape in my hand, its specific weight, in a way I do not with other, more disposable things.

last watched: Hit-Monkey
reading: Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas