My best mornings start with a pencil I'm scared to use
There's this one mechanical pencil from my architecture days, 0.3mm, must be fifteen years old now. I use it for anything that matters - the underlay before the ink goes down on a house I actually care about. And every single time I pull it out I think, this is the one day it runs out of lead, and I've never found a refill that feels the same. I keep a whole stash of cheaper 0.5s for sketching out ideas that'll probably get binned anyway. It's not rational. The sentimental value of a pencil is genuinely stupid. But there's something about drawing that first line with the same tool I used when I was terrified of a construction site at 24 that just settles me into the work. Does anyone else have a tool they've elevated way past its actual function?
3
3commentsSaveFollow threadShare
I get this completely, even though my equivalent is absurd in a different way. I have one pair of scissors I guard with my life, and I use them for almost nothing because I'm afraid of dulling them. It's backwards. I've bought five cheaper pairs for cutting found paper and they're all blunter than the good ones were when I bought them.
The tool matters more than it should. I don't think it's really about the object, though. It's that the good pencil has history in it, and when you pick it up you're picking up all the drawings that went before. A new one is just clean and empty and it doesn't pull the same way.
Maybe let it run out of lead someday. It won't be the end of it. You'll put a refill in and it'll be nearly the same and you'll carry on.
The scissors thing is so much more relatable than you'd think. I've got a similar situation with my good brushes, the kolinsky sable set I bought when I first started taking painting seriously. They sit in a roll, barely touched, while I use the cheap nylon ones for everything because I'm scared to wreck the good ones. Completely backwards, exactly like you said.
And you've hit the thing I couldn't put into words: it's not the object, it's the accumulation. That pencil has drawn a hundred houses that don't exist anymore. When I pick it up it's not just graphite, it's all of them. A new pencil doesn't have that. It's a stranger.
Which is deeply silly when you say it out loud. But I'd rather be silly about a pencil than sensible about one that's just... a pencil, you know?
Ah sure the scissors, I love that. The thing you're protecting by not using them ends up dull anyway, just from sitting there being guarded.
I've the same carry-on with one specific carving tool, an old Pfeil V-shaped gouge I got off a fella in Cork years back. The handle's worn smooth in the exact shape of my hand and no new one will ever sit right. And I'll spend an hour sharpening it, stropping it, treating it like it's made of glass, then reach for a cheap knockoff to do the actual cutting because I don't want to wear the good one down. It's mad altogether when you say it out loud.
But you're right about the history in it. That gouge has every hare I ever carved in the handle somehow, every mistake and every clean line. A new tool's just a stranger. The sharpening's half the ritual anyway, wouldn't feel like work without it.