Refilling a Varsity

Posted on by Bill Chance

I believe that we all have addictions. Trying to navigate this vale of tears without a healthy dose of irrational cravings is an impossibility. The key is to chose your addictions.

Good luck.

At any rate, one of my addictions is Fountain Pens. I have no idea why: a childhood memory? The pure gadgetry of the thing? The nerdiness? The relationship to writing? I don’t know why. I only know that I don’t fight it.

Much.

In the spectrum of Pen Collectors I am what is referred to as a USER. I don’t care about how expensive a pen is, I simply want to write with it. I don’t care about rarity, or perfect condition, or if someone in time past had their name engraved on their pen (I think this is cool, actually). My favorite thing is to find some beat up old antique caked with dried ink and desk drawer dust at Canton or some other flea market – then disassemble, clean, repair, replace, rebuild, and then, actually write with the thing.

Enter the Varsity.

Modern fountain pens do not, as a general rule, stand up to vintage writing instruments.  There are exceptions.

One interesting specimen is the Pilot Varsity. The Pilot company is a Japanese manufacturer and purveyor of fine pens that can cost thousands of dollars. (their Vanishing Point model is very popular, their expensive shit is sold under the sub-brand Namiki).

The Varsity is one of their low-end models, very low-end. It is disposable. You can find them in office supply stores or some bookstores for around three bucks each.

They even come in packs of seven different colors for about two dollars each.

The crazy thing is, they are great writers. A wet medium line, a surprisingly smooth nib, very reliable, rarely leak. If you want to give writing with a fountain pen a try, this is a great way to do it.

I like the Varsity so much, I decided it was too good to be disposable. When my blue model went dry, I decided to re-fill it.

My favorite color is a bluish-green and I decided to go there, with a slant on the green side. I chose two compatible inks: Private Reserve Spearmint and American Blue. I assembled all my tools: pen, ink, pliers, and an irrigation syringe.

Tools

Pen, ink, syringe, pliers.

I grabbed the nib with the pliers and pulled it out – it gave away with a nice firm click. The nib is the metal part of a fountain pen. It sits up against a ribbed plastic bit called a collector. This is what holds a dab of ink up next to the nib so it can go onto the paper quickly. A fountain pen is accurately described as a “Controlled Leak” – the collector is what controls that leak. In the Varsity the steel nib and black plastic collector came out of the clear body in one piece.

Easy. Much better than the method this guy uses.

I washed everything out and put some diluted green and blue ink (mostly green) into the syringe.

Pilot Varsity

Pen, nib and collector removed, cleaned out, ready for new ink.

I was a simple process to squirt the ink back into the body of the Varsity and then push the nib and collector back in. A good shove and it clicked back as it was before.

And now it writes again. I saved myself three dollars (minus the cost of the ink) but that’s not the point.

Varsity Refilled

The Varsity refilled with a sample of the ink color. My handwriting is terrible, it always has been.

Now that I think about it… I don’t actually know what the point is. Points are overrated, I guess. Aren’t they?

A junkie fix for my fountain pen addiction. Not too bad as addictions go.

Rufus Amalgam loved his Bluetooth.

Posted on by Bill Chance

Our writing group is meeting most every Wednesday after work. I’ve been doing more editing than writing lately and this week I didn’t have anything fresh to bring. I don’t like to show up empty handed, so I whipped off a silly little quick thing simply for the amusement of those involved. Now I’m sticking it here too.

If you want to read the genesis of my bit of scribbled rag, read Peggy’s blog entry, Here.

Rufus Amalgam loved his Bluetooth.

“Hey Hunk, I’m telling ya’, this is a great deal. If you keep tellin’ me no, one day you’re gonna look back and be pissed at yourself for passin’ this up. And I ain’t gonna feel sorry for ya, neither.”

Rufus’ buddy Hunk had recently lost both his elderly parents. He had received a large inheritance. That was supplemented with a healthy negligence lawsuit settlement from the tour operator that had let its bus break down in the desert. The bus was full of elderly tourists, including Hunk’s parents, on the way to a wilderness tour of an Indian village near the Grand Canyon. Heat stroke is a terrible way to go, but Hunk’s grief was washed away by the cash.

Hunk had been estranged from his parents for twenty years – ever since in a fit of youthful self-destructive pique he eschewed his families ‘ long-proud ancestral regal title, hired a lawyer,  and had his name legally changed from Percy Beauregard to Hunkahunka Burninglove. Ever since, everybody called him Hunk – except his family, which never called him at all.

And now Hunk was rolling in it.

Rufus had Hunk in his sights as a mark, or at least a potential customer, but Hunk was acting a lot smarter and with more discretion than his ridiculous adopted name would indicate.

“So that’s what it is going to be, is it,” Rufus said, finally giving up. “Hey, now, let’s not let this get ‘tween us, now. Saturday night, The Palace of Love, OK?”

Rufus was not happy when Hunk was noncommittal about a big Saturday night at the fanciest strip club on that side of the city. Rufus knew he could tap his flush buddy for a night on the town, a big night. He didn’t have the scratch to pull it off on his own.

“Man, these Starbuck’s soft chairs are sure comfortable,” Rufus said in the same loud booming voice he used on his Bluetooth phone, even though he wasn’t speaking to anyone. He lowered the book that he held in front of his face a fraction of an inch to survey the scene in the coffeeshop. It had filled up a lot since he had come in and sat down – luckily the barista didn’t seem to notice that he hadn’t bought anything. A table of four women was glaring at him, so he raised the book back up and tried to concentrate.

“48 Hours to the Work You Love.” What a load of crap. He had been reading the book for a week now and nothing had happened. He still hated his work. The real estate crash had made everyone wary and tight. Rufus had been working for Glengarry Properties for three months now and hadn’t made a sale. He had been following the instructions – locate a client with money to invest, find that person’s weakness, and then exploit it. No luck.

Rufus had found the “48 Hours…” book in a pile dropped outside the dumpster at his apartment building. It looked like a good idea, but Rufus couldn’t get a handle on what the author was trying to say. He was never much of a reader anyway. But at least the book was good as something to hide behind while he was trying to bilk some marks from the comfort of the Starbucks.

He was getting desperate. His power was off at home, so he had to go out and find some air conditioning. Glengarry paid for his phone and Bluetooth, but they were threatening him with termination if he didn’t produce anything. His salary was less than minimum wage, no benefits to speak of – he was supposed to make it all up in commissions.

He was relieved when a buzzing at his waist gave him an excuse to ignore his book-skimming and answer his Bluetooth.

“Rufus… whatchagotgoinon!” he bellowed into midair, his book deflecting the soundwaves into all corners of the Starbucks.

“You miserable, lying scum, you disgusting bastard!”

“Oh Sandy, it’s you,” Rufus smiled when he recognised Sandy Samsonite, a woman he met six months earlier when they worked in adjacent cubes at the call center. Rufus always felt there was a connection between the two of them. They were fired together when they were both caught smoking weed in the alley during afternoon break. It was Rufus’ idea, but it was Sandy’s weed, so he always felt she was responsible and owed him a solid.

“God, you no-good…”

Rufus cut her off. “Hey, Sandy, how did your date go?”

“That’s why I’m calling. That moron you set me up with… he was the biggest perv I’ve ever met… and that’s saying something. Not only that, he was cheap. A cheap perv. And boring… a boring cheap pervert… that smelled like bad chicken.”

“Well, Sandy, I’ll give you that one,” Rufus chuckled into the air. “I noticed his aroma… I thought it was our lunch.”

“Jeeze, Rufus, I don’t know how I managed to let you rope me into this. You owe me big time now.”

Rufus had convinced Sandy to go out on a date with Sylvester Radio, a painfully awkward man he had met at the door of a class called “Coming out of Your Shell”  on the State campus. Rufus had figured that the cost of the class would indicate anyone enrolled had spare cash and the shyness thing would indicate weakness. Mr. Radio fit both criteria.

A couple beers and Rufus was able to pry Sylvester open and a smidgen of information fell out. Sylvester hadn’t had a date since his cousin had gone to his senior prom with him and Rufus figured a night out with Sandy would deliver him into the not-so-happy family of Glengarry Properties investors and a start to the painfully exclusive club of Customers of Rufus. He had to bribe Sandy with his last twenty and a handful of Oxycodone, but she had agreed when Rufus promised to cut her in once he had his fish hooked.

But it looked like things had gone wrong. Horribly wrong.

Happy Towel Day!

Posted on by Bill Chance

Today is Towel Day. That’s the day we celebrate the late author Douglas Adams and all he created.

I first came across The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy  in 1980 or so when a forgotten cow-orker loaned me some eroded cassette tapes with a bootleg copy of the BBC radio series. It was great. It was more than great. I still remember the laughter and awe as I listened to those fuzzy warbles tumbling out of my pitiful portable picnic player. These were the days before Dolby. Long before Mp3. Before Benny Hill. The only exposure to British humor we ever had was the invasion of Monty Python a few years before.

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty- five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

But Douglas Adams wasn’t merely Bristish humor. He was pure imagination spiced with droll bitter sarcasm, yet leavened with an innate sense that things will turn out all right after all. Somehow.

I guess is was very improbable that a set of tapes would wind their way to me in the vast emptyness of the Kansas plains, but they did. Very improbable, but not infinitely improbable.

After the tape, there was a BBC television series (which was great), a stage show (which I never had a chance to see), a series of books (which are great, of course), and finally a big budget Hollywood motion picture (which was…. well it had Zoey Deschanel in it).

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

Douglas Adams, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”

I am proudly in possesion of an autographed copy of So Long and Thanks For All the Fish. I remember slipping away across the Interstate to the mall where he was signing copies when it was first published. The series wasn’t at its full popularity in the states yet, so there was no line – I bought a couple copies and had him scribble. Now, I wish I had stayed a bit and had a chat, but I had to get back to work.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Douglas Adams

So I give thanks to Douglas Adams on his day for the years of enjoyment his creations have given me. Am I carrying my towel today? I’ll never tell.

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Douglas Adams

Remember, Don’t Panic

A bit of text found on my Alphasmart, file seven

Posted on by Bill Chance

I’ve started carrying my Alphasmart Neo again. I’ll write about my Alphasmart soon – for now, if you don’t know, it’s simply a portable keyboard designed for schoolkids that works great for writing first drafts. I had to clean out the old text from the machine. Seven of the eight files are full of stuff I wrote a while back. Six were parts of short stories: “Single Malt” – a modern retelling of Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” which  will be in my upcoming short story collection, and “Like Regular Chickens” which… well, won’t.

The seventh is a bit of text I wrote and never uploaded – at least I don’t think I ever took if off of the Alphasmart. If I’m wrong and I used it somewhere – sorry. It’s a bit of true story written down in the third person. My name isn’t Frank. The kid didn’t have spiked hair. I was involved in a minor accident in the MiniVan. It totalled the van, actually, but that didn’t take much, it was a rolling piece of shit. A shame, really, it was a rolling piece of shit, but it was rolling, and that is the only thing important to me.

Before I clear the memory of the Alphasmart I wanted to put the text somewhere, for safe keeping. Why not here?

At any rate, here’s a snippet of writing, truth, fiction, whatever.

——————————

The first surprising thing about a car accident is the sound. It is very quick and very loud. A pressure wave of impact, a punch of suddenly rended metal and a tinkling trail of showering glass and small steel pieces striking the asphalt.

The second suprising thing about a car accident is the way that your logical mind catches up with your limbic system. The inner ancient lizard brain knows something has happened, somthing bad, though it has no idea what. That hank of emergency response nerve endings, shoved up inside your big old bulbous fancy modern brainy grey matter has been there, unchanged, since the days of charging mastodons – so how could it know about automobile crashes?

Something sure sets it off, though. Before the final bit of physics (Newtonian laws observed, bodies at rest disturbed, bodies in motion trying to stay in motion, gravity, energy adsorbed and turned into waste heat) has played out it sends out its panic juices. Eyes bulge, heart races,  fingers clutch. Only then, too late, really, does the mind catch up. The eyes look around and the brain starts trying out scenarios – “Did that guy behind me just rear-end my car?” “Was that a truck?” “Where did THAT come from?” – but every possibility is thrown out – judged an impossibility by the information coming in from the eyes.

So Frank sat there motionless, stunned. He wasn’t hurt, though his teeth ached a bit from being forced together with his head impact-shoved into the seatback. Then he saw the mangled motorcycle out in the middle of the intersection ahead. That was what had hit him. He had been patiently sitting motionless at the intersection in the left turn lane waiting for the green arrow. He looked at the crumpled machine, watched fluids running out of the mess,  and realized the rider was nowhere to be seen. Frank’s engine was still running so he switched it off and started working up the courage to open the door. He didn’t want to. He didn’t even want to look around. He didn’t want to think about what had happened to the rider. Finally, he decided that there was no getting around it and with a rictus of dread stretched across his face, he opened the door and stepped out onto the little strip of concrete that served as the left-turn median.

The people from the other cars were already out and looking around.

“Where’s the rider?” asked Frank as he gingerly looked under his truck.

“Oh, he’s way back there,” said the guy from the Honda parked in back of him. “He was racing, doing wheelies, and he must of fallen off his bike.”

“You mean I was hit by a riderless bike?”

“Yeah, looks like it.”

“Did he hit you?”

“Nope, it went right by me, bounced off you and that red truck, then out there.”

Frank looked back and saw about fifty yards back up the road, some kid with blond spiked hair trying to stand, brushing road grime off his leather jacket. Frank was glad the kid was all right, relieved he didn’t have to deal with a mangled corpse jammed under his truck.

Still, looking at the damage to the back quarter of his truck, the twisted metal, the shredded tire, the pile of red plastic bits below where the brake light used to be, he found himself wishing the guy was hurt – at least  just a little.

————————————

Now that I read that snippet, I think I”ll steal a piece of it, clean it up, punch it up, and insert it into another story – “Tailgate.”

There’s a rear-end car accident in that one, and I like the bit about the sound of rending metal.

Invasive Species

Posted on by Bill Chance

One ancient cobwebby memory  – hazy and indistinct – actually, I’m not sure if this happened at all, I was only a little bit o’ snot, but I was visiting some old woman and stuck my finger into her parakeet’s cage and the bastard bit the crap out of me. I don’t remember blood (and blood always sticks in a child’s memory) so it must not have been very bad. It barely hurt, but it sure embarrassed and scared the piss out of me.

Ever since, I haven’t liked parakeets.

Now there are these birds called Monk Parakeets. They don’t look like a parakeet to me, they are too big. Another name for the same bird is Quaker Parrot (and another is Myiopsitta monachus) which seems a little bit better to me. They aren’t your old spinster’s parakeet. What the hell is the difference between a parakeet and a parrot anyway?

—Back from Googling— Oh, a parakeet is simply a small parrot. A subset of parrotdom. You don’t hear the term Budgie (from budgerigar) much in Texas, which is a shame in my opinion. There are also cockatiels, which are small cockatoos. There are even parrotlets, a name that sounds almost as cool as budgerigar.

At any rate, some of these Monk Parakeet fellers escaped captivity back in the sixties and have been thriving in the wild. They have become an invasive species. That’s quite an ugly descriptor for a colorful bird, even if they bite. It’s more than a little controversial, but many people think the birds damage crops and upset the natural balance of the ecosystem.

Invasive.

Like a lot of people, I first heard of feral budgerigars from the documentary “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.” I assumed it was a San Francisco sort of thing, until I started reading in the local Dallas paper about the battle between the Monk Parakeets and the local electric utility.

It seems the emerald fowl like to build their large irregular nests in the midst of high voltage power distribution systems. They may be attracted to the warmth. These grow until a stray stick shorts across an air gap, the nest catches fire, and the neighborhood goes dark.

A colony of parakeets set up housekeeping in a large transformer yard near the White Rock Lake Dam. That set up a battle between TXU and the birds, with the local animal lovers taking sides.

It’s a complicated question. They are an invasive species, like dandelions, kudzu, or the Japanese beetle. Unlike these, however, monk parakeets are a cute invasive species. Attractiveness counts for something, even if you do set fire to high voltage distribution systems.

TXU did build some towers especially designed to lure the nesting sites away from the electricity. These have been ignored by the birds. Over time, everyone seems to have settled into an uneasy truce, with moderate amounts of nest removal keeping everything under control.

I was thinking about the Monk Parakeets and realized that there is this power distribution system near my house. The local Duck Creek trail runs up to the transformer yard, because it is built under the high voltage towers that string north along the Owens trail. I had walked past the place, listened to the power hum, felt the warmth in the winter, but never looked for birds.

Have the Monk Parakeets invaded the power transformers down the road from my house? I was planning on going to the library and try to get some writing done. I’m close to getting twenty stories together for my Kindle book, but I have some editing left. Looking at my schedule, I was able to carve out a few extra minutes and stop at the power yard along the way.

Sure enough, as soon as I pulled up I saw the telltale masses of sticks lodged in between the conductors running up the towers. The birds actually live inside of these things, well protected from predators, if not high voltage. The air was filled with the raucous cackling of the birds. They can be trained to speak human without much trouble (I’ve always wanted a trained bird that cussed and insulted people) but these were very vocal in their own vernacular.

Monk Parakeet

A parakeet flies by.

I walked around watching and listening to the Parakeets as they came and went, often bringing more sticks to enlarge their dwellings. The birds are very pretty and active – fun to keep an eye on. They were tough to photograph; there was a wall topped with barbed wire in the way and they were pretty wary about the whole thing. A sign on the wall said, “Report any Unusual Activity,” and gave a phone number.

Monk Parakeet

A couple of Monk Parakeets working on their nest.

Plus there is all that voltage. A faint whiff of ozone. It was strange to watch the delicate, active, colorful birds playing around the cables, towers, and insulators. Their cackling competed with the constant droning hum of the immense power coursing through the place, running all the air conditioners, lighting, and big screen televisions for miles around. There was no way to safely get close – no way to cross the external boundary of the transformer yard.

And that was fine with me; I didn’t want to get bit.