I can’t imagine not having a word processor,

having to bang on a manual typewriter with full force of my muscled fingers, keys decisively stamping symbols on paper, putting a Western touch on some Chinaman’s wildest dream of a millennium ago. Or even having gone electric, that ball with a mind of its own bouncing off a hard rubber cartridge like a madman trying to free himself from his lush padded cell. The nice thing about a word processor is that you don’t have to commit to format until the last minute. Words can just be words, running wild with imagination and playing with each other with no thought of the future. That’s until He, El, the guy upstairs, decides they’ll graduate high school, then go to college and study to be poems, articles, screenplays, or novels, according to their own individual strengths or in response to market forces, as the case may be. The only sad thing is that I, who used to be so wild and free and a man of the woods and a man of the world am now reduced to sucking juice from public utilities like some child of the matrix, some womb gone wrong. The old manual Olivetti, smelling slightly of lightly oiled steel, still sits in its case in a room in a corner of the universe, awaiting a call-up of the reserves, proudly defiant.

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