The Best Goddamn Pen Ever Produced

Which, unfortunately, appears to have come from Lilly Pulitzer

The author’s research staff, moments before contributing nothing.

Last week, I had a dream that I found a pen.

Not a dream where I could fly. Not a dream where I was being chased through a high school I haven’t attended in thirty years by a faceless man with a chainsaw. Not even one of those dreams where the coach sends you into the game and you realize, with mounting horror, that you have no idea what personnel group, formation, or decade you are in.

No. I dreamed I found a pen.

More specifically, I dreamed I found the pen. The one I’ve been searching for. The one currently sitting somewhere in my house, quietly carrying an emotional burden no writing instrument should ever be asked to carry. In the dream, I found a whole box of them, like some sad suburban Indiana Jones, except instead of recovering the Ark of the Covenant, I had discovered a lifetime supply of medium-point suburban happiness.

I woke up genuinely disappointed.

This is where I am now. I have reached the stage of life where my subconscious is no longer producing sex dreams, flying dreams, or nightmares about failure. It is producing dreams about office supplies.

Which is how I know middle age has officially moved into my subconscious and started rearranging the junk drawer.

The hostage-taker, in this case, is a Lilly Pulitzer pen.

I know. That sentence should not exist. A grown man should not be emotionally dependent on a writing utensil best associated with bright floral patterns, resort wear, and women who look like they know exactly which fork to use at a charity luncheon.

And yet, here we are.

The pen itself is nothing flashy. It does not look expensive. It does not arrive in a velvet case. No one hands it to you while wearing white gloves. It is not the kind of pen a man signs a peace treaty with, or uses to close on a lake house, or dramatically taps against his teeth while pretending to understand what a tax write-off is.

But the second it touches paper, everything changes.

It has weight, but not too much weight. Grip, but not the kind of aggressive rubber grip that makes you feel like you are preparing to write hostage demands. The click is clean. Confident. Adult.

The ink comes out smooth and dark, and the pen moves across the page like it has a pension and a clean driving record.

This was not just a pen. This was Bo Jackson in Tecmo Super Bowl, but for middle-aged handwriting.

It writes better than anything Staples has ever produced, which is both a compliment and an indictment. I have purchased entire packs of pens that seemed personally offended by the idea of ink delivery. This one made even the dumbest note feel slightly more important. Eggs. Trash bags. Call dentist. In that pen’s ink, all of it carried weight.

The problem, of course, is that a pen like this does not simply appear in a man’s life with proper documentation. There was no box. No receipt. No origin story. One day, it was just there, somewhere in the domestic ecosystem, the way certain objects materialize in a house with women in it.

Hair ties. Decorative bags inside larger decorative bags. Water bottles. So many water bottles.

And now, apparently, a pen engineered by NASA and branded by a company that makes dresses for people who summer as a verb.

At some point, either my wife or daughter acquired this thing through a purchase I was not emotionally or financially prepared to investigate.

The clip on the pen says Lilly Pulitzer, which sent me, reasonably, to the Lilly Pulitzer website. This was my first mistake. Lilly Pulitzer, from what I could tell, does not sell pens. They sell dresses, tops, swimwear, scarves, bags, accessories, and various brightly colored items designed to make Midwestern dads realize that they’ve been dressing like Adam Sandler since 1997.

But pens? No.

I was not merely searching for a pen. I was searching for a possibly discontinued women’s resortwear-adjacent promotional pen that entered my home through mysterious channels.

That is a very specific kind of crisis. Because if Bic stops making your favorite pen, you can complain like a normal person. If Lilly Pulitzer stops giving away the perfect pen with a floral blouse purchase, you are left explaining to the internet that you are a grown man desperately seeking backup writing instruments from a women’s resortwear brand. A brand whose target customer packs a second outfit for brunch, just in case brunch becomes an event.

This is how a man who once had actual goals in life ends up typing phrases into Google that make him question every decision that brought him to this point.

“Lilly Pulitzer pen.”

“Lilly Pulitzer click pen.”

“Lilly Pulitzer promotional pen.”

“Lilly Pulitzer blue ink pen smooth.”

“Lilly Pulitzer pen where did this come from please help me.”

I checked Google. I checked Amazon. I considered entering the dark web of promotional office supplies. There are places online that sell bulk pens from banks, hotels, dentist offices, insurance agencies, and, oddly, something called “The Greater Milwaukee Tartar Sauce Authority.”

I don’t know what the GMTSA does, but I assume it has bylaws.

The worst part is that the pen offers no clues. No model number. No manufacturer. No tiny stamp that says Zebra or Pilot or whatever factory in Ohio or Taiwan or Bangladesh is secretly responsible for this miracle. I found myself turning the pen over looking for any microscopic brand evidence like I was trying to solve the Zodiac case with better office supplies.

Then came the knockoffs. Every search produced pens that looked close but were wrong in ways only a man deep inside a stationery spiral could understand. Too skinny. Too shiny. Wrong clip. Suspicious grip.

They were the dating profiles of pens, attractive enough to click on and dangerous enough to regret. Or so I assume, since my dating years ended back when people still had to disappoint each other in person.

I even started judging other pens more harshly. Hotel pens, once a beloved category in my personal economy, suddenly felt unreliable. Bank pens were beneath consideration. The free pen at the doctor’s office had the courage to advertise vein treatment while writing like it needed a referral.

Despicable.

Meanwhile, the original remained on my desk, still writing beautifully, still refusing to explain itself.

That is the quiet panic of the whole situation. The pen is mortal. Every sentence costs something. Every grocery list brings us closer to the end. Every time I use it now, I feel like I’m putting miles on a classic car. I have seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off enough times to know how this ends.

This, I realize, is not a normal relationship to have with an object that could be accidentally used to label leftover taco meat. Especially by a family member unaware they were holding an instrument forged by the gods.

But that may be the point.

There was a time in my life when I dreamed about ambition, escape, glory, sex, football, and whatever else my brain thought might make me seem interesting. Now I dream about a pen.

That sounds sad, but I’m not totally convinced it is. Embarrassing, yes. The kind of thing that should probably stay between a man, his God, and whatever company collects his search history, definitely. But sad? I don’t know.

Maybe this is just what happens when life gets smaller in the best and worst ways. You stop dreaming in movie trailers. You stop imagining yourself sprinting through airports, quitting jobs in dramatic fashion, or standing on some metaphorical mountaintop while the music swells. At some point, the fantasy becomes quieter. Nobody needs to pan out over a skyline. Nobody needs to cut to black.

You just want the right pen.

My life has become so stable, so domesticated, so aggressively dad-shaped, that my subconscious has apparently stopped asking, “What do you desire?” and started asking, “Maybe I can get these in bulk at Costco?”

And honestly, that’s fair.

Because there are categories of joy you cannot understand when you’re younger. You cannot explain to a twenty-three-year-old the pleasure of a good chair, a quiet kitchen, a reliable snow shovel, or finding the exact container lid on the first try.

These are not dreams you chase. They are dreams that sneak up on you while you are busy folding laundry. Then one day you realize your life has not become less meaningful. It has just become weirdly specific.

And if you are lucky, every now and then, one of those specific things writes beautifully. And if that sounds too dramatic for a pen, fine. I accept the charge.

There are worse things to care about. There are worse things to notice. Most of life is not made of enormous revelations anyway. It is made of tiny preferences we slowly gather without realizing they have become part of us.

The coffee mug that feels right in your hand. The sweatpants that no longer belong in public but still deserve respect. The seat on the couch that is not assigned, exactly, but everyone in the house knows damn well belongs to you.

The pen is just one of those things.

Maybe this is pathetic. Or maybe this is adulthood: learning that happiness is sometimes not a grand achievement, but a pen that moves across paper like it has somewhere to be.

I still haven’t found the replacement. The original is still here, still writing, still carrying the full emotional weight of my middle-aged existence. Someday it will die, and when it does, I will handle it with the dignity and perspective of a grown man.

Which is to say, I will probably blame my family.

A small SilentPunt programming note: the last couple weeks have been unusually busy. The men-not-looking-at-each-other piece became my most-read and most-shared newsletter yet, which either means I have finally found my audience or America has more unresolved urinal trauma than previously understood.

Last week’s conversation with Bill George also did really well, and I’ve got some excellent guests lined up for the summer. I also published the first of two reported pieces from inside the UFL’s replay/rules operation (here), with the second coming soon. And yes, the Matuszak book is still very much alive, staring at me from the corner like a 6-foot-8 tax document.