Okay, I have to come clean (from my other post/rant about BP pens). BP pens used to be my favorite pen believe it or not. Ever since I was a kid (and that was a long time ago) I’ve loved writing instruments. I don’t know why, but I always have and BP’s always held a place in my heart. For the longest time I had this thing about simplicity and it’s pretty hard to get any more simple than the old Bic (crystal) BP pen. Back then I had tried FP’s, but they were messy and required too much attention (the cheap ones, I couldn’t afford a nice one). BP’s seemingly never ran out of ink, pretty much always wrote when you needed them to, didn’t need to be capped and could take a beating and still keep going. There was something about how a full note page written in BP took on a life of its own. It had to do with the way the pen embossed the paper and changed it somehow. There was this sense of the effort it took to complete, a certain romance to it.

All of this was floating around in my head, unformed, when in about 7th grade there was this girl in one of my classes. I don’t remember her name, but I had a mad crush on her. She was as cute as the day is long, just drop-dead gorgeous, but she was a bad girl…a rebel. She slouched, she smoked, she cut class…and she wrote on every single surface which would take ink. Nothing was spared. She doodled on paper, she wrote on the table, she wrote on the wall, she wrote on her books, she wrote on everything. I’d never seen such a prolific ‘writer’. She even wrote on herself. She had beautiful handwriting too, and was a really good artist. I remember one day sitting there looking at her as she drew some exotic mural all over her blue jeans. Her weapon of choice was a simple ballpoint pen. One end of it was chewed, but the other end was all business. I remember thinking to myself how she must have had something inside of her which just needed to get out, and writing was how she was going to get it out. She didn’t have a favorite pen, any old pen would do. Heck, half the time she didn’t even have a pen at all and needed to borrow someone else’s. One thing was certain though; she always used a pen, a blue pen to be exact, and it was always a BP.

The sheer quantity of writing / doodling this girl could do in just an hour or so was stunning, bordering on staggering. She would fill up a sheet of notebook paper with so many things the paper would literally curl, and in the span of an hour she could fill an entire notebook of paper. Her sketches were vivid and her writing expressive. Every surface in her world was covered in BP pen ink. I marveled at the things she could do with a simple BP pen. I began to wonder how many BP pens she had used up completely in her life. It’s pretty hard to use up an old Bic BP pen, pretty hard indeed. Most will lose the pen before they use every bit of ink in one. We moved away after 7th grade so I never knew what became of her, but I never forgot that girl and her writing.

One day I found myself looking at a Bic pen and marveling at its utility. Thinking back on the girl from 7th grade I set out on a quest of sorts. I made up my mind I was going to take that pen and try my best to use every single bit of ink in it. I would find out it’s nearly impossible to completely exhaust a (medium) Bic BP pen. I came close a few times (where you could no longer see ink), but inevitably the pen would get lost or permanently ‘borrowed’. (Side note – Bic pens in fine point are fairly easy to expire for some reason, but the mediums will write forever). It became a challenge to me…for many, many, years actually.

For years, everything I did in pen I did with a medium BP pen. Sure, I still used pencils (and there’s another story here too) when the situation dictated, but when I used a pen it was a medium BP pen. It started with the simple Bic crystal and eventually moved on to other pens like the Parker Jotters and others. Then a funny thing happened. I realized that my love of medium BP pens now had me on a different kind of quest; I was determined to find the absolute best BP pen available. The style of the pen meant little really, it was all about the writing experience for me.

Through High School and then college this quest continued. Even after college, in my professional career, I still sought out the ultimate BP pen. Along the way pen technology changed. First there was erasable BP’s, then rollerballs and ultimately gel (and more on this in a moment), but my focus remained on BP’s

I can honestly say, I believe I have tried just about every single type of BP pen known to mankind. I’ve traveled the World for business and everyplace I ever went I made an effort to try every single BP pen a country had to offer. After all these years, up until just recently, my conclusion has always been; it’s pretty hard to improve upon the age-old Bic crystal BP pen. Sure, you can find more expensive pens in a prettier wrapper, but the sheer utility and writing experience with a Bic is hard to beat. Recently though I’ve discovered a pen which just may have unseated the venerable Bic, it is the Papermate Ink-Joy pen. Time will tell.

So now maybe now you can see how my (other) rant on BP pens is actually not some impulsive outburst, but rather one founded upon a life long love affair with the very same pen…a ballpoint.

And now you know…the rest of the story.