The Part I Don't Love

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By chance, here I am talking about something I loathe on Valentine’s Day. No worries – all is well at home, and as you are reading this Janet and I are no doubt enjoying a romantic dinner together. However, the pencil that made a brief appearance in yesterday’s article – including my love/hate relationship with it – brings me around to finally writing about it:

I love writing about pencils no one has written about before – not "undiscovered," obviously, but definitely the unusual the unsung, and the . . . the "un-thought about." I generally don’t like writing about things I’m "supposed" to like.

As for this W.S. Hicks, I know I’m supposed to like it the same way I’m supposed to like the girl in a Playboy Centerfold -- and dammit, I do like it. It’s just too gorgeous not to like it, even though I also agree with one of my pencil buddies who called it "gaudy":

But the thing I don’t like it, and the part that I never will like, is what it’s made of:

This thing was so important when it was made that it was even given a manufacturer-scratched serial number.

I don’t like this kind of pressure. It’s hard to enjoy a pencil that’s in my safe deposit box. I don’t like the pressure of knowing, if gold prices skyrocket even further in the midst of a financial meltdown, that this may someday be destroyed for the intrinsic value of the metal it contains.

None of that stopped me from paying a small fortune (by my standards) for it. And I do like knowing that at least during my lifetime, it’s safe.