I don’t need any more material goods in my life. I might be a struggling member of the working class perpetually living two paychecks from homelessness, but in global terms, and historical terms, I live better than Tiglath-Pileser I. I have food from around the world in my cupboards, literally more books than I can read, and a surfeit of furniture, gaming consoles, DVDs, and miscellaneous assorted crap.

But I fucking love stationery.

And so I enjoy the emotional experience of longing to possess gorgeous papery and inky things. Things that would perform little function other than letting me make Gollum hands over them.

At the moment I have a craving for this Frida Kahlo fountain pen, by ACME Studio.

It’s not the best likeness of her in the world, it’s offensive in its appropriation of Day of the Dead iconography, and she is a poor choice of figurehead given Kahlo’s decided anti-capitalist stance. I shouldn’t want to support ACME making money from her memory by buying one, right? And yet I do. So much. The Pen. Give it to me.

I can even argue that the US$158 cost is perfectly reasonable because a few years back Mont Blanc put out this limited edition Frida Kahlo fountain pen. If you can find one for sale it will set you back around US$22,000.

This pen is worth more than my internal organs on the black market. Both of them make the Ohto Dude Hexagon Barrel Fountain Pen in Deep Violet, at US$23.97, from iPenStore, look cheap as chips.

I’d buy it purely from spite because I can’t have the other two, only I don’t think I can live with a pen called “Dude”.

But then I could branch out into dip pens! Check out the Windsor writing case, with three dip pens. And nibs! And a place to put your uncapped bottles of ink.

My problem here is that as you can see, one of the dip pens is made of twisted glass. And the filthy, depraved part of me associates twisted glass with dildos (that link goes to Amazon, but it’s NSFW all the same. Probably. Unless you argue with the IT department that it’s a decorative neck massager or something.) Frankly the black one looks awfully phallic too. Like a sounding tool from some explicit RedTube porn that I am not going to link to, because you don’t need that in your life.

And I don’t want to write with either a dildo or a sound. So if I bought the set I’d have to immediately throw away two pens and buy something to replace them. Which is backwards. Buying should bring me peace and contentment, not send me out looking to buy something else.

But if I collected enough pens, I could argue I needed the Vox Luxury 60 Pen Display Case, primarily because it’s on sale at the moment, down from US$799 to only US$499.

I mean, just look at it. You’d just want to sit and open and close the drawers all day. I bet they slide like silk. And it drives me bananas that there are 1 percenters out there who probably have one of these full of Mont Blancs they never use because they’re too busy stepping on the fingers of the proletariat as we try to claw out way into the lifeboat of financial security. They’re assholes, but they’re assholes with good taste in stationery-related accessories.

I’m also gonna need a journal cover. Can’t have all these pens without something to write in, after all. I’m being practical, okay?

So I need an Oberon hand tooled large leather journal cover. With optional pen loop. Need, right? Like oxygen. I have debated for many hours which one, because they are all amazing, but in the end I have settled on the Hokusai Wave in Sky Blue. Look at the fastening buttony thing – it’s also got the wave on it!

Luckily for me one of these is not in the ready-to-ship category so my credit card is safe today.

I won’t actually be unwrapping any presents this Xmas; we do presents for kids only. But when I’ve driven home on Xmas night, put away the leftover French Strawberry Tart, and poured myself an extremely large eggnogg, I can sit in front of my Mac and stroke the screen and just enjoy the wanting. Because sometimes the wanting is the best part.

Tell me what inky or papery thing you’re wanting right now, and let me want it too.