I’ve been dream­ing of get­ting a Mont Blanc for years, ever since I tried one out at a jew­ellery store back home before I bought it for my boss. I loved the way it felt in my hand, the per­fect weight, the bal­ance, the shine, the smooth­ness of the nib, the effort­less­ness of the writ­ing, the click of the cap, the ele­gant but time­less design. A few years lat­er, I went for a sur­prise vis­it to my old work­place, and when my boss went to sign some­thing he pulled out the Mont Blanc, my Mont Blanc, from his blaz­er pock­et. That made me hap­py.

The thing is, I could nev­er jus­ti­fy buy­ing one for myself; I would always tell myself to wait until I could cel­e­brate my grad­u­a­tion or mar­riage. My boss was a busi­ness­man, so he could use a nice pen to sign his con­tracts. Every time I’d pass the Mont Blanc dis­play in the mall I’d check out what the most cur­rent series was.

While I was in Hong Kong, I found a lit­tle shop sell­ing them at very low prices.

Then I real­ized that I had already grad­u­at­ed.

I bought a jet-black Meisterstück Classique Rollerball with plat­inum fin­ish right then and there, and my god how sweet it is. I can’t imag­ine using anoth­er pen for the rest of my life. Sometimes I put my hand in my pock­et and then real­ize, “Holy shit, I have a Mont Blanc in my pock­et”. So far, this is the only thing that I can think of putting in my will.

Sometimes I’d walk the streets of Hong Kong and see a guy sell­ing fake Mont Blanc’s, a bunch of them clipped to a cheap felt board. It’s as easy to spot a fake Mont Blanc as it is to spot a fake Rolex. The price I got mine for in the lit­tle shop was cheap­er by more than $150 CAD than the price in stores here. I want to get it engraved with my sig­na­ture but it costs $120 to send to the Mont Blanc main head­quar­ters, which is fuck­ing insane (it’s a cool process though, where they take four of my sig­na­tures, then mix and match the best parts of each to come up with the engrav­ing). I sup­pose that for some­one who’s buy­ing a pen from the Meisterstück Solitaire Platinum line, $120 is almost noth­ing. I’m con­sid­er­ing my next Mont Blanc pur­chase as a foun­tain pen from the new super sweet Starwalker series Resin Line, but that’ll be some­time far into the future.