Cross Pens

 Dec 10

CNET is the new Consumer Reports, except a lot better. Look at all these reviews: the best cheap wine. Frying pans. They're not just electronics anymore. CNET is where I found these awesome blankets. Check this out: 7 pens, $14 to $575.

I'm surprised there aren't any Cross pens on CNET's list. Maybe that just shows I'm out of date. I got a Cross pen around 2005, about $20 or so I think. I still use it every day. It's basically indestructible. 

So, you know: don't give me a pen for Christmas. I'm set for life, and if a young person inherits my Cross, they're set for life.

 

Dec 31

I told you that I had had my Cross pen for decades and that it was pretty much indestructible. Which was true. So, naturally, about a day or two after that I lost it.

Got a new one from Amazon, but I didn't realize that not all Cross ballpoint pens are identical. Far from it, turns out! So the refills I had for the old one won't fit into this one. Also, the old one rolled open and shut, silently as a ninja. This one clicks.

You're thinking: it clicks. What, is that actually a problem?

Yes it is. A first-world problem.

And now, suddenly, I'm wondering about all sorts of things. There are some very wealthy literary families. People whose great-great-grandparents had Henry James and Turgenev over for dinner. Are their homes filled with veritable piles of Cross ballpoints, the way there were piles of Bic Stics at home when I was a child?

And this thought takes me a step further: would the thought of Cross ballpoints give brain-nausea to some of the economically-elite among the literary, because they still refuse to convert from fountain pens to ballpoints?

Dec 31

I know how important this topic is to you, so I'll be keeping you updated. 

I lost the old Cross pen, the one I'd had for decades, somewhere between Kroger and home. In Kroger I used it to cross items off my shopping list. And when I got home, it was gone.

My best guess is that it slipped out of my right front pants pocket, where I keep the Moleskine notebook, the pen and the phone. Hopefully it's somewhere here on the floor in the house or on the floor of the car, and I'll find it again.

I'm hoping to find it again, not expecting to. More likely it fell on the floor in Kroger, or on the ground in their parking lot, and it's gone.

So I was thinking: would the pen fit into the pocket of the Moleskine notebook?

It does. I wonder whether Bruce Chatwin kept a pen in the pocket of his Moleskine?

Bruce Chatwin was the douchebag over-rated travel writer who is responsible for Moleskines being known as Moleskines.

Moleskines are actually very good notebooks, and the Cross fits right into that pocket, so when I went to Kroger today, I wasn't so worried.

And I know that makes you very happy.