Chapsticks get buried.
They are sometimes found beneath the rubble of wrappers in my car, lost in the canyons between seats; melting then hardening, melting then hardening, melting then hardening. Their guts sometimes leak onto the unkempt gray carpet and sometimes merge with a Smith’s grocery receipt and smudge the heinous items I’d bought three months prior. The itemized receipt is a gravestone engraved with a box of frozen taquitos and shelf-stable queso dip (Kroger Brand Nacho Cheese). The funeral procession: tiny pebbles marching a plastic casket into oblivion so the large, gluttonous God above cannot find it. The Hot ‘n Spicy McChicken wrapper will say a few words, and the rotting lettuce from a Taco Bell soft taco will put it to rest. In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. It usually all ends at around sundown. Then the liquid solidifies and they celebrate the second, third, or fourth coming of the chapstick.
We’re a ChapStick family. ChapStick the brand. I mean in as much as a [INSERT BRAND NAME HERE] family is a [INSERT BRAND NAME HERE] family. My dad has a certain adherence and brand loyalty that his generation is very staunch about. Red Wings are good boots, Stetsons are good hats, Hondas are good Jappo cars, as he called them. Even as a racist white Vietnam Vet Cowboy/Diesel Mechanic it’s about quality. The, “You get what you pay for mentality.” It’s either Coke or nothing at all for Russell. The silent vitriol spit at my mother about her purchasing generic “cola” the one time she did in 1996 is something I vividly remember. It was less about a stance in terms of quality that he stood by. Though, it was less silent vitriol, he came off more like an older pouty child on the couch with his chin folded into his neck like a tom holding a bright red can that read “A+ Cola.”
It was always, and only, the original black ChapStick he had in the ruminations of his pockets. The white plastic caked with black grease from him working on engines all day; the sandy sludge would make its way onto it and into the interstice where the top meets the body of the stick. The skin-colored pinky inside would jut up, the soothing salve it’s meant to be, touches your lips with a certain familiarity like it’s designed to be your own finger. It’s never an odd sensation, never has been, or sometimes is in a state of over and under thought. If anything you make the mistake of biting it. Well, the crimson colored one at least. You feel more comfortable biting something less skin colored and more flesh colored like the cherry ChapStick. That cherry wax, red with a scent you can’t help but want to chew. The ambrosial nature of artificial cherries overtakes you. It makes you forget what real cherries smell like. My first memory of smelling the fleshy drupe was via this ChapStick. Real cherries, they smell like the tough young skin of a tiny plum. You only smell fresh cherries before you bite them, and I didn’t do this until I was a teenager at a friends house. Maybe the cherry zest in Chapstick is based on a type of cherry we’ve never tasted before and only existed once. It’s in the backyard of a Michigan distiller, who captured its essence then sold it to Dupont for $400.
What is custom among these cylindrical plastic tubes filled with carnauba wax, beeswax, petrolatum, cetyl alcohol, camphor, paraffin, lanolin and sometimes cherries is that they stay. Yes, they will be lost amongst the chiding burnt edges of receipts and buffed pennies, but eventually they will rear their heads and affectionately press into your palm like a bunting stray cat. Then the needing lips have their thirst quenched, as if they’d been calling out to it all along.
Pens don’t die.
They just do not fucking die. To plot the murder of one takes a crucial purpose. There are many sacrifices to be made when doing so. The thigh is the first to go; at least in my case. Wranglers and big thighs make for a ripe stabbing ground. The case as of late is more so in my life because it’s quantity not quality in the service industry. Cheap Bic Round Stic M pens that are translucent gray and write like a child’s finger nail dipped in ink. Good for signing checks and receipts, offering to strangers, and sweeping up in your apartment along with plenty of dust and the dried dismembered legs of dead roaches. Meanwhile, my own haunches of muscle and fat are getting prodded by these cheap writing apparatuses, 32-inch waistline: antidepressants and drinking. 34-inch waistline: stress, overeating, antidepressants and drinking. 36-inch waistline, caducity, stress, overeating, antidepressants and drinking.
They are everywhere—abundant, eventually forgotten Though occasionally, they sit there in front of you on your desk in a dusty shaker pint glass with a handful of dried sharpies to create the abandoned bouquet, because you’ve accidentally pocketed so many. I have no problem encountering another one of these gray harpies. The last drip of ink will likely never be spilt onto a page from it for any self respecting writer because they’ll get thrown away long before that ever happens. They like to play “dead”, are thrown out and there is another clone to happily take its place. The effort of shaking it and licking the tip is just too much. I don’t at this time respect myself enough to get a better pen, and many an unreadable note of novel ideas have been written in notebooks with these poor bastards. Though drunkenly written, I blame the tool not the user for its lack of readability.
My second favorite is the Pilot Varsity which is a disposable modern spin on fountain pens. Phenomenal, if you know how to master it. Volatile in nature—bleeding on the page and on your skin. The ink stains on the inside of my index finger and in the pockets of my pants really made me feel like a writer, but they’re just not pragmatic and on occasion would make me think of the asshole with round James Joyce glasses using a typewriter in a coffee shop. White, with round glasses and foolish enough to not seem smug in the vale of absurdity that radiated with each keystroke.
I killed one. And only the one, once. It was my favorite kind of pen, the Pilot G-2 O7. The G-2 is sharp, smooth, refillable and surprisingly a click pen. Most click pens are not choice.

It was purposeful, and calculated. At the time I wrote everything longhand. Not pragmatic. I would take my pants off at night, remove the pen from my pocket and set it on the desk. I would observe its dropping ink levels as I wrote into my Moleskine notebooks. I’d regale friends with this paltry plot: to use a pen to its end.
“Have you ever used a pen from beginning to end? Birth to death. Actually death. A pen that you bought, not got and used up its whole fucking insides? Every drip of blood.”
They’d usually respond no.
“No, because it doesn’t happen. The moment is too small. If you happen to encounter the end you either shake, lick, and continue on. Or your patience runs thin and you toss it before it’s dead. They are vast and somewhat immortal because you can access another one at basically any given moment. You only think you’ve seen one die, but truly you have not.”
This purpose took on some mythological recourse. To truly witness the end of a pen.
Then it came. As unremarkable as the notion that entered my head, the last bits of ink skitted onto my page to an wonted end that most noticeably paralleled one shitting their pants in whitey tighties. Then the notion of the pen shitting stuck in my head far too long after that, and brought me much unneeded anxiety.
Lighters are mostly stolen, then stolen again.
Bics, cheap clear-colored plastic lighters that you can see the butane in, and so on have all crossed so many hands they know not where they were born or where they’ll die. Humans used to die 133 miles from where we were born. We now die 237 miles from where we are born. Lighters die 4,000 light-years from where they are born. They mostly live on eternally, just changing form and color from night to drunken night. It’s a fruitless practice to keep one on you, because one will eventually end up in your care. As a smoker, I’m a foster parent for lighters. Unfortunately, the state doesn’t pay me by each lighter, though I do remember an instance in which I had four. It’s unfortunate the state doesn’t compensate me for each. Two in each pocket, they weighed down my pants and cluttered my thighs and fingers when I darted them into that dark denim cave. Within the week they were all gone and I found myself lighting a cigarette at 1am on an electric stove and running out the back of the house so as not to coat the indoor atmosphere with my nicotine shame.
I only ever once owned a Zippo. It went about as expected. It sat dry and deficient of lighter fluid in my junk drawer for about six months. I was dismayed by the task of having to purchase something else in order to get it to work. Although it was an expensive lighter by comparison, it was a lighter nonetheless, and having to inject it to life through its steel anus and cotton rectum was not arousing. After about six months of occasionally playing with an empty Zippo, I worked up the courage to buy that brightly yellow colored bottle of Ronsonol Lighter Fuel. I pulled its red plastic foreskin back and put the white plastic penis spout in the lighter’s rear, and the pungent combustible substance spilled out all over my hands. I was addicted to smelling my fuel stained hands for two days. Being a diesel mechanic’s son, you come to love the smell of petrol, unleaded or not. I’d catch my dad sniffing it straight out of the fuel pump nozzle at gas stations, and my mom would have to ask him to clean his nose because he got a little too liberal with the liquid Wite-Out ( made by Bic). The Zippo disappeared within a month.
Grill lighters make me feel like a cowboy when I use them to ignite my cigarette. I holster it half in my front pocket and twirl it around my trigger finger like a revolver while I puff, taking any possible opportunity to light other’s graying cherries. I’ve been witness to these long necked fire breathing horses dying. They just breathe harder and faster. No juice on the trigger, the propane running thick from the grill without a light, then you have to use the rarest of finds: the wooden match.
I call the clear colored plastic lighters “gas station lighters” even though I purchase most of my lighters at the gas station. They’re the ones you buy instead of a Bic because it’s a few cents cheaper and your cigarettes were a few dollars more. The butane evaporates from its innards in the melting atmosphere of your car in the summer, and the flame when you pull the regulator to the right lights comically large enough to engulf your dart. I traded a Bic for one in Marrakesh that was yellow and had a plastic flower inside it, floating light in the butane. The man I traded the Bic to was ecstatic as I was. I now understand his excitement.
Bics are the crowned kings of the common lighter. They are economical, ubiquitous, and light every time. Every time, because you never keep one around long enough to see it die. I’ve seen dead ones shaken back to life, then disappear into the care of another. It’s unlucky to encounter a dead Bic, and a prompt burial should be had if you happen to come across one in order to avoid misfortune.
Officially according to Bic these lighters are not refillable, but with a thumbtack and a canister of butane, you can achieve this unsanctioned act. It’s better to let the mechero expire, and not carry around some abomination of the esteemed machine. It also looks profoundly stupid to have a sanded down thumbtack sticking out of its ass.
Frivolous objects, straw in our veins, that fill our lives with modest tenor. They wear us and leave. As light as they came, they left just as light with no goodbye.
I carry most of these objects on me. There is something to being a utility man. My dad was a utility man which is “being a gentleman,” he’d say. Him being a mechanic, it was an apt cree to live by. Ideally, I would like all three on me at once—at all times. The holy trinity of utility as I call them. An apt cree of a writer admonishing. There’s something about being there for the diminutive needs of your fellow human, friend, future lover. A note of inspiration on your hand, the final moistening before a kiss, the lighting of that last cigarette before she leans her wrist in too close, and the bud almost burns your face—you inhale the remnants of smoke coming out her mouth when she laughs, because you want to breathe in all of her. I had all three on me for many first kisses; a utility man, a gentleman. I had all three on me when I got dumped by someone I loved. I had all three on me when I got into a scooter accident and knocked out all my front teeth, the white chiclets were also pocketed that night. I had all three on me when I received word that my brother was murdered. I wonder if he had all three on him then. He was a utility man too, though my dad never let him know it. I was always weary about it after that. Being the father, son, and holy spirit comes with a certain celestial consequence. These objects are both benevolent and malevolent in nature. So, I’d subconsciously yet purposefully lose one from there on out. If you happen to ask, I’ll have one and only one, so that our meeting may fit into the chaotic cosmic order, or fade into its fickle tendrils.