Stewart Dawson
The Writing With No Pen
Every pen has been done. And all the ink has been used up. Here in my tiny space in Wisconsin I only have a magic marker to write things down. It is the middle of the night, one thirty AM, and all of my pens are dry. I needed to write this down. I have a lot of pens that are the ones I like but they are all empty and I threw them all into the waste basket. A pen without ink is like a sun without a day to shine on. Earlier, I went to two different stores looking for a new pen, but neither of them had one I wanted. I don’t care for ball point pens and pens that click open bother me. In fact, I only like one kind of pen and I don’t remember what it’s called. But I know what it looks like. It has a sharp tip and blue ink. It writes real smooth. I can only find it in the Office Store in Albuquerque. I usually buy them in boxes of twelve. But I have used the last one up and I am far away from Albuquerque. I just threw the last one away this morning. It makes me sad to throw away a pen. It’s a little like burying your grandmother when all her blood is gone.
Going to the big store in the town far down the road just to buy a pen is not really worth the drive. Besides, it is the middle of the night and the store wouldn’t be open anyway. A store closed in the middle of the night is like a pen without ink or a grandmother without blood. I have magic markers and Sharpies and highlighters and pencils and chalk and crayons and even paint brushes and some paint. You can use those things to write with, but only like you could use a semi-truck in a stock car race. My computer has cyber ink but I have to get out of bed and turn it on to write something. It is just too cumbersome. I can bang my head until it bleeds against a legal pad, but blood makes lousy ink.
Trying to write in bed in the middle of the night with an inkless pen was like trying to eat raw, dry, stale oatmeal with a busted heart. It gave me a headache.
Then I hit myself three times in the face trying to get an aspirin into my mouth. It was stuck to the sweat on the palm of my hand. And tears only make invisible ink.