Nostalgia Revisited

A man shaves with a straight razor, dresses, tucks his fountain pen and mechanical pocket watch into his waistcoat, dusts off his spats, leaves his home and walks across the street paved with cobblestones to his internal-combustion car, which he drives with its manual transmission to his club, where he dines on steak and oysters, and then relaxes before the fireplace with a cigar and a snifter of brandy, exchanging witticisms in Latin with other club members while someone extemporizes upon the grand piano.

 

16 things which either are, or are perceived to be, in decline: straight razors, fountain pens, mechanical pocket watches, waistcoats, spats, cobblestones, internal combustion engines, manual transmissions, private clubs, steak, oysters, fireplaces, cigars, brandy, the Latin language and grand pianos. But each of those things are staunchly defended by groups small or large. Internal combustion still predominates, but it will be outnumbered by electric vehicles much sooner than some people realize, while not soon enough to suit some of us, who are concerned about climate catastrophe. 

The number of people who eat steak is shrinking, and it seems it will continue to shrink. Vegans consider the human consumption of beef to be a catastrophe in several major ways, while others think that life without the possibility of steak would be a disaster, and I must say that I sympathize with both sides in this fight. The vegans make very convincing arguments. On the other hand, we still have teeth designed to tear flesh, and the smell of a well-prepared steak still makes our mouths water. It still makes my mouth water, at least. Are the vegans really immune to this lure? 

I think that if the vegans want to win, they will have to produce great quantities of delicious vegan food. And it seems that many vegans agree, because the amount of truly delicious vegan food is growing at an amazing rate. This will be much more effective than the stereotypical unbearable self-righteous disapproving vegan.

I've written often in this blog about my love for mechanical watches. But even I am wearing a G-Shock right now. They just work better. Yes, can get a mechanical watch which does 80% of what a $100 quartz watch does, almost as well as the quartz watch. You can get such a mechanical watch for as little as $50,000. 

Fountain pens are more of a mixed bag compared to ballpoints and gel. Fountain pens can, unquestionably, do much more than other pens. But the amount of work it takes to keep them working is -- well, it's much more than the amount of work it takes to wind a watch every day, if your mechanical watch is not an automatic wristwatch which winds itself as your wrist moves when you wear it.

If you're an American, you may or may not be amazed to learn how many cobblestones are still in use in Europe, and even on a few of New York city's streets, and for all I know, maybe in many other American cities too. What about cobblestones in Canada? Or Latin America? Hey, good questions! I don't know.

Anyway, maybe I've been a bit of a douchebag for the way that I've repeatedly attacked nostalgia, because I feel a protective urge for most of these old-timey things, and I can at least sympathize with most of the rest. And that doesn't make me, or anyone else who likes these things, reactionary.

But, Aha! you exclaim. The club! It excluded women, and most men, too!

But Aha! yourself, I shout back at you. Just because you were in the club in 1903 didn't mean you weren't progressive. You could go to the club and argue that club membership, and even the vote! should be given to all women and men. Just because you love a stick shift doesn't mean you're not going to get an EV -- or even a bus pass. Loving history does not mean that you hate every progressive evolution. Conversely, cheering on ever-better automatic transmissions and EV's, and doing away with writing on paper altogether, let alone fountain pens, and being vegan, and having been the first to abandoned straight razors and spats -- alas, none of that guarantees that you are not, politically, socially, a reactionary pig! You can't judge the citizen by her timepiece!

Why I Still Write With Ink on Paper

 

For one thing, I don't even know what a Remarkable or a Supernote is, to quote someone asking on Reddit why people still write in paper notebooks. I'm 61 years old, I'm a writer, and I resisted even using a typewriter until I saw the Internet in 1997. As with many other people, that changed things a bit for me, and I started using keyboards more than I had. But I still write a daily journal in ink in a paper notebook that fits in a pocket. Partly because I'm old, sure, but also for other reasons. 

I'm fascinated by other technologies besides pens on paper which are no longer generally considered cutting-edge. For example, mechanical watches: watches with no electricity, no batteries, powered by a spring. Revolvers as opposed to semiautomatics. Internal combustion engines, even though I'm a hair-on-fire climate activist. We should all be driving EV's or not driving at all. But I understand some of the resistance to change on this matter, the resistance which isn't built on ignorance, but on love for technologies which are being phased out. 

My brother, 59 years old, an automotive engineer and executive, tells me that offices often no longer have what we used to call office supply rooms: rooms full of paper and paper-related items such as pencils and pens and tape and staples.

So people our age are becoming odd, and started becoming odd long before we noticed it, I'm quite sure, writing in our paper pocket-sized notebooks with our fountain pens, which we clip in our waistcoat pockets alongside our pocket watches, sighting down the long barrels of our single-action revolvers while the barkeep fetches the ice-cream from the icebox for our sarsaparilla sodas, with our Model-T's idling outside besides the troughs, startling the horses. 

But there's more to it, and you don't have to be old to enjoy a good pen. I'm still very new to the pen and notebook subreddits, and so I still don't understand why everybody hates Cross pens. I still don't hate them. A two-piece Cross Bailey like the one in that picture, nice and heavy, with its rollerball and luxurious deep blue lacquer, nice and heavy, writing in a Zequenz signature notebook, is a sensual pleasure, a luxury many can afford, especially if they're no longer blowing money on gasoline. 

An Open Letter to Time + Tide, the Australian Horological Publication

You've got a current headline which reads:

RECOMMENDED READING: Apple sold nearly 10 million more watches than the entire Swiss watch industry in 2019

Well, good luck with the Apple watch crowd. Because all of these recent articles about quartz watches and smart watches are losing us who like mechanical watches and used to like Time & Tide. We had 45 years to start liking quartz watches before the Apple Watch was invented -- didn't happen, did it? And yes, we do know that quartz watches are much more accurate and that smart watches do all sorts of amazing things. We just don't particularly care.

It also will do you no good with me to compare smart watches to electric cars, because I'm already completely on board with EV's. That's right: electric cars and mechanical watches for me, please. And solar and wind power and the death of the oil, coal and gas industry just as soon as possible!

And I'd dump mechanical watches too if they spewed poisonous gases the way internal-combustion vehicles do -- but they don't, do they?

I know, the Apple watch geeks will stare at us mechanical-watch geeks as if we were pods, as if we were simply inexplicable beings. News flash: most people already looked at us that way, and we already knew it, and we already didn't care. To us, the others were always the pods, and right now, anybody who tries to talk us into Apple watches over mechanical watches -- is of course a pod. There's not even the slightest question about it. And there's also not even the slightest question that some of the people who work at your magazine are one of us and not one of you, and they'll quit, and they and we will be just fine. In fact we'll be better because we'll be just a little bit more convinced of each other's genuineness once pods like you have been weeded out.

We had of course assumed that you, Time & Tide, were one of us, but we'll live. We'll live wearing mechanical watches, and sometimes even carrying mechanical pocket watches, and not being the slightest bit tired of having to pull them out of our pockets every time we want to know the imperfectly, mechanically-kept time.

We'll be just fine. Mechanical watches won't disappear. Quartz didn't make them disappear, smart watches and sleazy sell-outs like you, Time + Tide, won't make them disappear. Mechanical watches are already not about maximum profits any more than they're about the absolutely best-available precision time. Rats jumping ship will just make the love and dedication of those who remain shine more clearly. You're just pushing mechanicals further in the direction of art. Art hasn't disappeared.

Gas Stations and Charging Stations

According to statista.com, as of December 2018 there were 20,021 public electric vehicle charging stations in the US, with a total of 57,187 charging outlets. That was over a year ago. I don't know what the current figures are, but I know they're much higher, because the news I follow is always full of headlines about new charging stations opening.

So that got me thinking about how many gas stations there must be in the US. I figured there had to be a million of them, but all the figures I see say that there are barely 100,000, and that the number is dropping.

What I haven't found anywhere is any total number of gas pumps in the US. If Mom and Pop gas stations with 4 pumps each are being put out of business by convenience stores with 16 pumps each, then the actual number of gas pumps could be rising while the number of gas stations drops. If the average is something like 8 pumps per gas station, that would make a total of roughly 1 million gas pumps in the US, and with over 250 million gas-burning vehicles, that makes over 250 vehicles per pump.

Let's compare this to the ratio of electric vehicles per public charging outlets. The US had 57,187 public charging outlets at the end of 2018. 250 electric vehicles per each one of those outlets would've made a total of 14,296,750. Were there 14 million EV's on the US roads in December 2018? Would've been nice, but no, the number was more like 1.2 million. Which means that there were less than 21 electric vehicles per charging station.

The whole point of this post has to do with something which afficianados of electric vehicles refer to as "range anxiety" -- the worry that you can't drive around very far or very freely in an electric vehicle because of the danger that you'll run out of electricity and be stranded and nothing can be done and oh my God it'll be so horrible. As people who know about EV's are constantly attemptinbg to point out to anyone who'll listen, range anxiety, like many other kinds of anxiety, is completely irrational. Yes, it's possible to run out of electricity in an electric vehicle, but it's also possible to run out of gas in an internal-combustion, and you'd have to be pretty careless to do either one.

And, actually, electric vehicles have a huge advantage over gasoline-burning vehicles in this regard. Most of us can't get gasoline anywhere in the US except at one of those 100,000 or so public gas stations. But there are a lot of ways to get electricity into an EV, including hooking them up to outlets which look like this:

There are a lot more than 57,000 of those outlets in the US, there are a lot more than a million of them, and every single electric vehicle can plug into every one of them. A lot of electric vehicles never or rarely have to visit public charging stations, because their owners just plug them in overnight every night, significantly lowering the average number of EV's which actually rely on that swiftly-increasing number of public charging stations. Becoming actually completely stranded in an EV in the US, with no access to electricity, would, I sincerely believe, be a lot harder than being stranded because your gas-burning car ran out of gas. To be completely stranded in an electric vehicle, you'd have to really work hard at it, and be exceptionally careless, and be way out in the boonies at the same time.

So, enough with range anxiety! Enough with worrying that you can't drive where you need to go in an electric vehicle! You can! If anything, there's quite an overkill in the charging infrastructure! That's the actual facts! Learn the facts, get an EV, or even better, take the electric train! That'd be even better for the environment. What electric train? Well, yeah, for that, you have to be in certain parts of the US, or in Europe or Japan or vast areas of the rest of the Earth. That's a good subject for another blog post. But for now, even in Murrka, there's just no rational reason to be afraid to drive an EV. Only irrational reasons.