Life Has a Hex Code

We fountain pen people are weird. Every month, around the start of the month, we do a version of the same thing: we make lists. What inks to put in what pens. Rotation schemes, seasonal palettes, elaborate spreadsheets that make a lighthearted hobby look like the desk of an air traffic controller. Not that I know what that looks like.

I tried doing all of it. And I hated it. I like four or five colors, and they are all blue. Jokes aside, throw in some gray, just black, lavender, pine green and purples — but everything with an undertone of blue. If blue was good enough for Miles Davis, it’s good enough for me.

My point is that the whole inky contortion was beyond my abilities. And then my friend Gailyn of Fountain Pendulum changed everything completely. By presenting a new way to fix this equation of pens and inks.

She announced her 2026 ink theme: tea. Every ink she uses this year would connect, in some way, to the world of tea — its colors, its moods, its quiet ceremony. Not a random rotation. A story.

I saw her video, and felt the particular feeling that only comes when someone solves a problem you didn’t quite know how to articulate.

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“Color is a power which directly influences the soul.”
— Wassily Kandinsky

I spend most of my time in California. I don’t have any major trips planned. At least for now.

That’s not a complaint. California contains multitudes, and more specifically it contains San Francisco, which means I have access to some of the most atmospheric light on earth roughly half the year, and the other half I’m under a fog bank so beautiful it makes my heart ache. I moved to San Francisco 23 years ago for a couple of years. Now you know why.

Fog. I have penned enough pieces about fog and its magic, and its metaphorical meaning, by now. “I like the muted sounds, the shroud of grey and the silence that comes with fog,” is how I once described its hold over me.

George Sterling, over a century ago, wrote “The Cool, Grey City of Love” and there is this one most beautiful passage that just makes me stay:

The winds of the Future wait
At the iron walls of her Gate,
And the western ocean breaks in thunder,
And the western stars go slowly under,
And her gaze is ever West
In the dream of her young unrest.

Whether it is life itself. Or appreciation for a place where everyone is trying to invent the future. Or embracing the idea of all of us trying to exist in their own alternative universes. Or a combination of all those. Those are broad brushstrokes of why I have stayed.

So I asked myself: what if the city was the palette?

San Francisco sits between ocean and bay, between the Pacific and the hills, between cold water and coastal air. The colors it produces are not the bright primaries of a travel poster. They are layered. They shift. They have the quality of light that painters chase and photographers wait hours for. I have spent days, hours and now almost a lifetime waiting for my eyes to embrace the changing hues in the middle of Fogust, on Ocean Beach, or when standing on the Embarcadero, listening to roars coming from the baseball stadium that just sits there like a modern-day colosseum, dedicated to keeping us distracted from the drudgery of life.

What I didn’t realize was that my collection had already leaned this way, without me ever planning it. I have created three custom inks that in a weird way try and capture the entire palette. The good people at Kiwi Inks helped create three magical color potions I call Karl The Fog, Ocean Beach, and SF Summer. But I wanted more than just those three.

So I came up with an arbitrary number. 26, because it is 2026.

Twenty-six inks, almost entirely blue-biased. Iroshizuku Kon-peki, which is exactly the color of a clear Pacific sky. Ainezu, a storm gray-blue that looks like the marine layer coming through at speed. Montblanc’s Coal Blue, smoky and deep like the bay at dusk. J. Herbin’s Vert de Gris, that oxidized gray-copper-green that is precisely the color of tidal water where fresh meets salt.

The bottles kept piling up in the closet of my overflowing home office.

I didn’t plan it this way. I just kept buying what looked right. What looked right, it turns out, was home.

Anaïs Nin said it: we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. I’ve been looking at the same body of water for years. Apparently it has been looking back.

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I created a simple system. And I mean actually simple. Two favorite pens that never change, always inked with the same inks that are meant to do the heavy lifting. Two vintage pens that need the safest, most forgiving formulas. And half-a-dozen rotating inks each month, shifting with the season. These inks allowed me to indulge in the pens from my collection.

January gets Colorverse’s Blue & White Porcelain and Hachimonjiya’s Gassan Blue Moon as an homage to the winter skies, cold and clear. March brings Pilot Kon-peki and Octopus Fluids’ Minze, because March in San Francisco means the first green is starting to show. August comes in with Hello Small Things’ Good Night Blue and Montblanc Great Gatsby, because August evenings here are warm and strange and go on too long in the best way. December closes the year with Pilot’s Fuyu-syogun — literally “winter general” — a gray that looks like morning’s mystical mix of mist, fog and cloud over the bay from the Embarcadero.

The calendar writes itself when you let the place do the work.

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I wanted this system because I wanted it to solve an even bigger problem. The problem of too many inks. Anyone who collects anything eventually arrives at this reckoning. The collection stops being a source of pleasure and starts being a source of obligation. You feel guilty about bottles you haven’t opened. You buy something new and feel the weight of everything that came before it.

William Morris put it plainly: have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. He was talking about furniture. He was really talking about every collector who ever lived.

Twenty-six inks. A city. A year. No new purchases required. No FOMO, wondering if the new limited edition is the one that changes everything. It won’t be. It never is.

The palette is already here. I’ve been looking at it through my window for years. I just wasn’t seeing it.

Gailyn’s tea theme gave me permission to think this way — to treat a collection not as an accumulation but as a statement about what matters to you and where you are. Her year will taste like sencha. Mine will look like the view from the top of Twin Peaks on an August morning, when the fog is below you and the bridge just disappears. The fog horns sound distant. The world muted.

That seems like enough.

The sea-winds are her kiss,
And the sea-gull is her dove.
Cleanly and strong she is—
My cool, grey city of love.

— George Sterling

March 10, 2026. San Francisco