I just bought sixty pens.

Oh, I didn’t WANT sixty pens.  In fact, I only wanted one.  But you can’t buy ONE.  Maybe at the five and dime, the corner store, but they went out of business, along with the stationery store where the proprietor knew every item in his inventory.  Now you go to the BIG BOX!  Where they have EVERYTHING!  Assuming you can find it.  But everything comes packaged by the ton.  So large, that you’ve got shopping carts in an OFFICE SUPPLY store.  Think about that, back to high school, when you bought your notebook and the paper to fill it.  Can you imagine wheeling a SHOPPING CART up to the shelf, because what you were going to buy was just too heavy to CARRY to the checkout line?  I didn’t scope out lined paper, I’m not planning to write any book reports, but you probably now have to buy TEN THOUSANDS PAGES!  Enough for everybody in your CLASS!  A complete educational supply, from kindergarten to graduate school, you probably can’t buy any less.

I’m a Write Bros. fan.  Oh, they don’t seem to call them that anymore, but I recognized the picture on the box.  The aqua Paper Mate with the medium point.

You know the reason they called them Paper Mates was because they came with two cartridges.  Yup, when one ran out, you just unscrewed the pen, broke apart the inner rod, and put the top on the bottom and VOILA!, you were writing again.  Kind of cool until you wondered…why didn’t they just fill up the pen to the top to BEGIN WITH?

I started out with a Schaeffer, with an ink cartridge.  No, I’m not THAT old, I never had one of those writing instruments you filled from the actual bottle.  Actually, I DID get one of those ultimately.  You unhooked a lever, dipped the nib in the ink bottle, and then closed the lever and the pen SOAKED UP the ink.  My father had talked about these old pens and I wanted to give it a try.  But only once.  Because the thing leaked so bad I had to throw it away.

Actually, the Schaeffers leaked pretty badly too.  You’d see kids in school with stains in their pants pockets.  If they were nerds, you’d see the stain in their SHIRT pocket.  But no one cool kept his pen in his shirt pocket.  That would be like keeping your COMB in your FRONT pants pocket.  Then again, I had one of those little plastic brushes, that you could put your finger through, we were WAY into personal grooming back in the sixties, before the dry look came in…

Anyway, you felt accomplished owning a cartridge pen, they took some skill to maintain.  You kept spare cartridges in your pencil case.  And when the ink ran dry, you’d unscrew the pen, slip a new cartridge in, and the process of screwing the pen back together would pierce the cartridge and start the ink flowing.  You MUSTN’T pierce the cartridge yourself, the instructions were clear, it was stated VEHEMENTLY, for if the hole was off center…  I’ll let you contemplate the awful result.

Oh, at first ballpoint pens were a novelty.  Something you gave away.  I remember my father getting five hundred to give away as a promotion.  Maybe it was five THOUSAND!  There was a giant box in the garage.  Sometimes they wrote, sometimes they didn’t.  And if they did, they didn’t write for long.

And then came the Bic.

I didn’t go for the Bic at first.  Not professional enough.

But by high school, everybody had switched so I did too.  I am not an early adopter.

The Bic would sometimes leak, but not that often.  And you couldn’t break the nib.  Didn’t they shoot it through doors on TV?  And they lasted…FOREVER!  The goal of owning a Bic was to use it up before you lost it.  I think I did this once in high school.  God, you could write for MONTHS on a Bic.

They ultimately expanded the line, to fine points, but they wrote too slow.  The key with the Bic is it wrote first time/every time.  Well, sometimes you had to prime them.  But once they got GOING!  Ah, nirvana, you could write fast and furious.  Like I did at the bar exam.  But there I wrote SO much I could actually see the ink reservoir go down!  Yes, Bics were clear.  At least the model I used to buy.

But then I switched to Write Bros.

It happened like everything does.  By accident.  That’s how you change shampoo, or deodorant.  You’re at a friend’s house, sans your own, and you try theirs and ultimately decide, SHIT, this is GOOD!  That’s how I got hooked on the Ban Pump.  And how I finally switched to Colgate from Ipana.  I believe I needed a pen when I was home from college and the only thing my father had were Write Bros.  I was reluctant, but I gave one a spin.  It was COMFORTABLE!  Oh, those Bics hurt.  They were industrial pens, no ergonomics there.  And they lasted just as long.  I SWITCHED!

And after my ex moved out, I found a stash of them.  She’d bought them in one of those fake charity promotions.  You know, they say they’re calling for the Blind, but the NAME of the company is Blind.  And, since no one writes anymore, that stash lasted FOREVER!  But now it’s gone.  I’m plumb out.  I had to buy new pens.

Oh, I was trying to give it a go with hotel pens, which are light years better than my dad’s old liquor store pens, but sometimes they choke, and they have too much friction, and they write lightly…  They’re good in a pinch, but they’re not real pens, even if you get them from the St. Regis.

So that’s how I found myself at Staples this afternoon.

I tried to buy one pen, I really did.  IMPOSSIBLE!

And then I noticed GROUPINGS of pens.  Four or five for $2.50.  That sounded better, I didn’t need the lifetime supply of sixty on the bottom shelf, for eight bucks.  But those in the groupings, those were all girl pens, fancy pens, rollerballs and shit.  God, I’m not into fashion, I just need a pen that WORKS!  I was flummoxed.  But then I noticed that eight dollar price was for TWO boxes of pens.  And I could buy ONE box of pens, SIXTY PENS, for $4.48 plus tax.  What choice did I have?  I laid down my bread.

But it got me to thinking.  How come Staples knows it, and Time Warner Cable knows it, and the record business doesn’t.  That you CAN’T MAKE ANY MONEY SELLING ONE!

Selling one is good for Apple, and good for the customer, but bad for the record business.  You see if you allow people to buy ONE, they spend LESS!  People are cheap, they labor over every decision, they don’t want to BLOW MONEY!  So, you’ve got to give them NO CHOICE!  And you’ve got to make them FEEL GOOD about having no choice.

I don’t feel bad about my sixty pens.  Hey, if you want one, I’ll give you one!  Maybe TWO!  I’m a magnanimous guy!  But better yet, I got a DEAL!  That one Bic…  It started out at seventeen cents.  Then went up to twenty when I was in college.  Since then…  Let’s see, the annual fee at Middlebury was $4,500 when I graduated.  Now it’s TEN TIMES THAT!  Which means one Bic pen should cost…  TWO BUCKS!  Shit, I got SIXTY for under FIVE BUCKS!!  What a DEAL!

Not that I’m gonna use all sixty.  Shit, it would even take a long time to LOSE all sixty.  So, if you let people have EVERYTHING, all the music extant, for one small price per month, they’d FEEL good, but would never be able to take all of it.  Shit, I’m always going back to Staples for more shit, just give me a subscription.

But I don’t want to rent pens, or lease them.  Return them when I’m done.  I just want to own them.  Give me the chance to OWN my music.

And then I realized the business used to have this right.  Singles were expensive, but albums were CHEAP!  But that was when albums were good.  Believe me, if my new pens don’t work, if they stutter, if they leak, I’m swearing off Paper Mate FOREVER!  But I’ve got faith in the company, they’ve never ripped me off.