Broken Pen

     I think I’ve figured it out. Whenever I write something that sounds stupid or awkward, perhaps even misspelled (did I spell that right?), I tend to blame myself. Now, I’m not so sure. Those poor quality ideas and bad mechanics couldn’t have come from my creative brain could they? Surely not. Some evil fairy with a basket of mistakes and misnomers must have sprinkled my writings with her nasty wares. Or a magician from Oz cast an ignorance spell on my notebook. Could be that the King of Clichés visited our planet and dropped his whole payload on my desk. Hard to know, really, but my number one suspect is my pen. It’s an inexpensive one, made for work and not strutting around libraries and coffee shops, announcing it’s oh so creative talents. It feels good in my hand and it’s blue, my favorite color. Normally it glides across paper effortlessly as it translates my thoughts into squiggles. Lately however, I’ve noticed an aberration in my pen’s behavior. The cap is loose, its clip is bent and it keeps unscrewing itself. The ink is getting lighter and I see clear spaces when I look at its thin cartridge. I think it’s about to be replaced by one of the fistful just like it that I have stuffed into an old jelly jar on my desk. I knew it. I just knew it. It couldn’t have been me writing that garbage! It was that damned pen! Probably taking payoffs from other jealous writers, no doubt. In the future, I will be careful, diligently watching for any disturbance in the force, lest my pen strays into the dark side. I will add any observations about that here, along with my other posts in our newly renamed blog. So welcome, my friends, welcome to The Broken Pen Blog.    

Billy Lord