So I busted TWO nibs, a car, and my forehead.

Hello! This was originally going to be a short write-up to have been completed several weeks ago, where I was going to tell you about the new Conklin rose-gold Omni-Flex nibs made by Jowo for one of my Duraflex special edition pens, and about what a difference it made in how that pen wrote. However, my blogging *and* my letter writing have gotten inexcusably delayed...so let me start by apologizing for the absence. I've kind of got an excuse...

I really should've worn those brown pants, given what I nearly did in them when this happened.

For the record; I use royalty free, not-copyrighted clip-art for this stuff. More on this absurd mess in a bit.

So! Nibs! Ahem. Yes, I'd started talking about nibs. I am the very proud owner of TWO special edition Conklin Duragraph pens: the "Dura-Flex". These came with Conklin's Omni-Flex nibs that were very hit-or-miss, as was the case with all of Conklin's nibs. But the pens themselves were just so gorgeous! This caused no small amount of heartbreak for folks like me who had a love of Conklin's "homage" vintage style pens. Over time, Conklin finally started listening to the complaints from customers and reached out to Jowo to have their nibs outsourced instead.

Eventually, all of their pens were being shipped with nibs made by Jowo (pronounced "Yo-Vo"; I keep trying to spell it "Jovo"), and replacement nib-units (feed, housing & all) with Jowo nibs also became available so you could upgrade your earlier purchase with the much better nibs. I got a replacement 1.1mm stub nib unit for my Conklin All American red, white & blue "Old Glory" pen because it's Omni-Flex nib wouldn't write, just like the one in my special edition Duraflex "Sunburst".

Unfortunately for those of us who had these special edition pens which often had rose-gold trim, those nibs required special plating to achieve that rose gold color and so were the very, very last ones to become available. So when they did finally come out, I immediately jumped at the chance to put one in my "Sunburst" model.

These DO have pocket clips. I've got them turned face-down to keep the pens from rolling off the table.

Here are my two Conklin Duraflex pens. You can click the image to see a bigger, "zoomed in" photo for a better look at what the two different versions of that nib looks like. The bottom one is their special edition blue with it's original nib, which wrote quite nicely when it arrived! However, that lovely "Sunburst" golden brown one on the top there, which was the second Duraflex to join my small Conklin collection, simply would not write when I got it. The nib it came with was awful. Hard starts, or no starts at all, and if you primed the feed you'd get a big glob of ink at once with a giant line on the page, which would then fade to no line at all again, it was scratchy as a rusty nail, etc... It was a huge disappointment and a prime candidate for one of the Jovo --er, Jowo replacements.

So for anyone who hasn't tried one of Conklin's Jowo Omni-Flex nibs, I can assure you that this was a HUGE improvement that's worth the small ($24.00 USD or so) investment. Installing the replacement one is a simple matter of unscrewing the entire nib unit out of the pen's grip section and simply screwing the new one back in it's place, perhaps after rinsing it out first under a kitchen faucet or with some pen flush in case there is any residual machine oil in the feed that would impede ink flow. Suddenly, both of my special editions worked wonderfully! It flows nicely, doesn't seem to railroad (but I don't really "push" the flexing with it; it's still a bit stiff), and writes smoothly! Naturally, I have a writing sample.

Again, feel free to click the photo for a close-up. That stupid fox has gone too far.

That's the "good pen news". I naturally have "bad pen news". Speaking of Jowo replacement nibs, the Goulet Pen Company has had them available as well, with their own logo laser-etched on them, as loose nibs (no feed or housing) in #5 and #6 sizes, and I've bought several of them over the years. I had one in a colorful Jinhao X450 pen that made it fun to write with. Those nibs aren't expensive, but they're not exactly cheap either... Just FYI, when you SCREW UP and drop that pen while you're trying to peer through the patio window blinds to find out why in the devil your loud neighbors have once again drawn the attention of the police, perhaps because you're a nosy judgmental busybody--ah, I mean, a concerned fellow tenant, and the accursed thing tumbles nib-down as it plummets to its doom, and there's a small metal trash can in it's path near your desk, such that the doomed pen whangs nib-down upon said trash can's metal lid, well friends, you've just kissed $20 bucks goodbye. It now has one nib tine that's bent backwards like a broken finger and is actually "busted".

You know what else costs in the neighborhood of $20 hard earned dollars? One of those smaller J. Herbin glass dip pens, that's what. I had one...had...on my desk. It was lying stylishly on it's side on a short wooden platform: a small re-purposed spice rack that acts as a little pen & ink shelf sitting on my desk top. There it struck a fine pose on my "well appointed desk", telling anyone who sees it just what an absolute BOSS the owner of that desk must be. Well, just a few days after the egregious wreck of that Goulet Pens nib, it got accidentally knocked off of that little wooden stand/shelf thing, fell perhaps 2 whole entire inches to the surface of the desk itself... 2 inches!!... and the tip of the glass nib snapped off! ARRGGHH! The Gods are against me!

Here are the very traitors themselves, atop my Lochby Field Journal. So, true to form, I've lived up to my name and have "busted a nib". Twice. Twice! That's $40 bucks I've just frittered away. If you want to send me a Hallmark condolences card, you probably already have my address. If Hallmark actually has an "I'm sorry about your busted nibs", I'll be mightily impressed. There's something vaguely emasculating about that; Hallmark shops probably keep these somewhere near the "Sorry that you're an aging clod" section. Here's a close up of the damage.

Sorry for the amateur-ish photos. The camera lens was blurred by my tears.

And this isn't the only recent wreckage in my life! (Sob...) Back to this issue:

On April 20 of this year, I was on my way to work, and there was a bit of snow falling. I stopped at a red light, as one is supposed to do at red traffic lights, and was the first vehicle at that light. I looked up just in time to see this utter buffoon who'd been looking at his phone fly up behind me at full speed (the limit there was 45 mph/72 kph), and KA-WHAM! This oaf rams the rear end of my car...which I'd almost paid off!!...and caves in my rear bumper. The back of my head slammed into the seat rest, and I had my right hand on the steering wheel so the "recoil" jammed my elbow and wrist up into it. I type at a keyboard a lot at my job, so that was quite painful for a while, and my arm would go a bit numb if I tried holding a pen for a while after that.

I am a gentleman; I will use my high-brow, old-school insults instead of the more gratifying yet unprintable ones: This 28 year old dull-wit, this cretin, this shaved ape gets out of his car in a strange hurry and tries to tell me "Hey, I've got $2K in my checking account! There's no real damage to your car!" (uh, what?? You smashed my bumper and nearly broke my neck!) "I really don't want this to go on my insurance! So maybe we could just..." etc. This poster child of the consequences of poor parenting skills appeared as if he was very much about to jump back into his own damaged car and flee!

Fortunately, there was at least one stroke of luck my way...this happened right in front of our small town's little Italian style café, where a Missouri Highway Patrol state trooper (real pros, they are; college-educated and highly trained; sturdy professionals worthy of respect, those folks) and two of our town's city policemen (Rambo wanna-be dweebs who I wouldn't trust with a broom and a dustpan, let alone a gun and a badge, who apparently hang out with state troopers to bask in their greater shadow) were just wrapping up a lunch break. That state trooper had just left the cafe's parking lot when this happened, and immediately flipped on his lights and pulled up behind Mr. Meat-Head's bashed-up Ford Escape thus preventing his, ah, premature departure from the accident scene.

We pulled off the highway into a nearby parking lot. The trooper had us take turns sitting in his patrol car's front seat while he typed in our particulars into a computer, made sure I needed no ambulance, and politely shooed away the two city cops who eventually meandered over to gawk at their hero. Those two guys, with exaggerated grins like teenage boys, offered to "take us off his hands". The state trooper knew better, and politely declined, thank goodness. Well, when he was done with me and it was time for Captain Success to have his own chat with the officer, it turned out to take quite a while. (This whole mess made me 2 hours late for work.) The officer came back to me afterwards and said..."Well sir, he told me that his brakes were in poor shape...and that he has no proof of auto insurance."

AAARRGHHH!!!

After the trooper wrapped up and left, his fool then tells me "uh sure I do, I just, ah, left my insurance card at my grandmother's house." He even plays up the "I'm really a responsible person, for real" bit and offered to let me take a camera phone image of his driver's license (which I of course did) and promised to call me later in the day with said insurance info (and never did), and eventually an investigator from my own insurance company called and verified that they ran a background check on him with his vehicle's VIN number...sure enough, he had no car insurance at all. So, I'm stuck with the huge giant insurance deductible to get my car fixed along with the doctor bills for the X-rays, pain medicines, neurology tests (the doc insisted on these), etc.

I'll also point out that this oaf (we don't hear the word "oaf" enough anymore) had a child safety seat in the back seat of his old car. An empty one, thankfully. I ask you, dear reader: who on Earth drives in moderate to heavy snow, with no breaks (if he is to be believed; I think he just didn't want us to know he was texting and driving) and no blasted car insurance, with a baby in the car?? Who is that reckless? That guy, apparently! Anyway, I've had 3 doctor's visits over this since then, my arm and my neck still ache and "pop", and I've got another crack-of-dawn doctor's appointment next Friday...with a neurology clinic, as a follow-up to check on my arm. (It *is* feeling better; and I hope to tackle my stack of pen pal letters from you nice folks soon!)

For what it's worth, when you work a swing-shift, 9:00 AM might as well be "the crack of dawn". Don't judge. The day after this happened, I took the whole day off work because I was too sore to move. Then, exactly 30 days later, THIS happens.

Why am I still wearing brown pants?

On May the 20th, I was at work, and had made the ill-planned decision to run out for a meal break since I was in too much pain that morning from the original wreck to get around my own apartment to pack a lunch that day. When I got back to the parking lot in front of the building where I work, the rain we were getting that day turned into a roaring monsoon! I was still in intense pain from the wreck (not to be all "woe is me" or anything; I'm feeling better every day), I couldn't see well through the epic downpour, and, well, I really, really had to PEE like you can't believe. (What did I say about "judging"?) Thus distracted, I slowly meandered around looking for the closest parking spot to the front doors I could find. While pulling aside a bit to avoid a fellow employee (this wasn't their fault) coming towards me from the opposite direction, I drove my poor car...sigh...directly into a concrete pillar.

These are the big concrete columns, 3' across, where one of the parking lot's big street lights are mounted. I was doing perhaps 5-10 mph, but it was enough to crunch through my front end and puncture the radiator. My increasingly fossilized head bounced off the steering wheel so hard that it took me a while to find my glasses which had flown off of my face. I'm not sure how much more of this abuse my head can take, y'all. I'm lucky it's still attached.

And that was it for the poor Busted Nib-Mobile. Now, it was just...busted. After wrangling with the insurance company for nearly a month after that and driving the most embarrassing rental car ever, a Volkswagen Golf, I got a final answer from my insurance agent. I'm 6'3" (1.9 meters, the same height as Darth Vader...it sounds more impressive when you say it in Metric) and the Volkswagen Golf is not much bigger than my shoe. Because accident #2 took place exactly 30 days after accident #1, the insurance company had some sort of clause that said they could combine both claims into one to minimize their costs, the jackals, and "total loss" the car. They wrote a check to the finance company for what portion I still owed them for it and I got the pittance that remained, and that was that. My long sought-after dream of having a car, with no car payment, was ruined. That is the truly soul-crushing thing. I'd gladly take another blow to the head to not have the last two and a half years of work paying off a car just gone, "poof", with nothing to show for it, thanks to one oblivious lying pinhead who couldn't be bothered to keep his eyes on the road in city traffic.

I'm told via a letter I got from the county prosecutor's office that the guy who hit me does have to answer for this in court, and "might" be ordered to pay me back my insurance deductible and what medical co-payments I had to pay to the doctors at the time the court hearing was first scheduled. Unfortunately, I've had more medical bills since then and the judge just keeps giving him one "continuance" after another, always postponing the hearing. So I've no idea if anything will ever come of it.

In the meantime, I'd like to give a hearty shout-out to my brother, who upon hearing of my plight, took me out to a fine lunch shortly afterwards at a local restaurant called Hemmingway's. He's cool like that. Our nice waitress saw me trying to get photos on my phone of the nifty aquarium behind the restaurant's bar and offered to take my picture standing in front of it. (Fear not; I only had unsweetened iced tea.) Just in case anyone ever wondered what I looked like...to paraphrase Yoda, "After two car wrecks, look as good, YOU will not!" ha ha. I'm lucky I wasn't in a neck brace. 😊

I usually *hate* getting my photo taken, for obvious reasons. I also have a midwestern accent to go with that unsightly face, just in case the photo itself isn't bad enough. If I never hear from some of you again, I will know why. 😁 Much gratitude to my brother who treated me to some quality dining that day...as he also just did again yesterday for my birthday! He's got style, I tell you. --Oh, and while this was an Earnest Hemingway, Teddy Roosevelt kind of outdoorsman's themed restaurant, please note that that's a FAKE rhinoceros head on the wall. It's made of fiberglass. The fish in that tank are real, though.

Now I'm off to give Kitchen Floor Cleanup Technician Molly a bath. Have a good weekend, and watch out for oblivious, brainless drivers. And I recommend getting the lowest deductible on your car insurance you can afford.

Molly, giving me the side-eye... "Bath? BATH, you say??" before hiding under the kitchen table.

--John