for angelika unverhau

The Fiery Furnaces - Duplexes Of The Dead

if i would be a collector i would be a collector of those good pens and i would never use the good pens because they would become like the good cutlery or like the furniture at the houses of italian immigrant families in 1975.  they would be good and so they would be no good to use.  plus like all collection pieces you can never use the thing you are collecting because the label of “collection” transmogrifies the thing into a thing that needs to hold value or if you like ink as the metaphor or analogy.  if you used the good pen it would lose some ink and so we’ve got to keep all the ink.  and this is not some kind of tirade about the gas prices because fuck the gas prices and fuck the goofy guy from the shins with the marital problems and also fuck sweet and sour sauce (which is for some reason a sauce that most people really enjoy).  and so what the fuck then is this value business and that pun was intended because here I have a very valuable glass jar of good pens?  i suppose after all the pens are not even pens any more and so they must be something else.  it’s clear that this something else does not have a name except if we pick up the whole jar we can yell “collection” at our loudest possible pitches and we would not seem crazy.  my favourite something is the one with the name address and logo of the plastics manufacturing company on the side of it.  this is my favourite one because the font used for the letters written on the side of it is easy to read and because it has a fine grip.  the grip is of course not really important in the practical sense but now it is very important in the figurative sense and this is great for me.  i keep this one in the middle of the jar protected by the other somethings and it is most days that i think about a time when i will need to visit a plastics manufacturer in some sort of emergency because in this fantasy i will save the day with my favourite something.