On the beaten path

I like to keep my overhead down. But in light of the facts, I don’t want to catch flak from any old-timers out there who may feel inclined to describe me as “in possession of a youthful sense of brazen entitlement” to modern technology; because, like most of you, I’ve still got the grit to go it alone. Just last week I wrote a letter of consolation to a good friend, and put it in one of those funny looking blue boxes lining the street. Damned if I know what will happen next, but it seemed like the right thing to do, under the unfortunate circumstances, to add that personal touch.

And now, heck, I’m drafting this Web log at 2 a.m. on an electrified typewriter that’s nearly as old as I am — a sound akin to machine gun fire emanates from my second-floor apartment on Margaret Street. Dogs are barking and there’s a car alarm sounding in the distance.

Typewriter=danger=sexy.

Some months ago, I got it into my head to get my hands on one of these dinosaurs.

It has been my experience that many of you are now thinking, “What the hell would make you go in that direction?”

I know, everyone’s so smitten with the ease of all this. But seriously, when given some thought, it’s possibly the same reason people like vintage cars, real plants instead of fake ones, black-and-white movies, live music, LPs, wooden siding, film photography, the radio, Battle of Plattsburgh, or in some extreme cases, a newspaper instead of a blog.

There may be those among us who are not following this intricate association of cultural symbols. Very expensive telephone surveys have probably been conducted on the topic of America’s capacity for nostalgia, and the numbers indicate that many of you would just as soon give up all that old stuff.

But I must say, if you are thus far enjoying any of this nonsensical rambling, you have a right to know that absolutely none of it would have been possible without my newly refurbished Olympia Electronic Compact II, High Recoil Edition, circa when men were men and children were to be seen and not heard.

I even replaced the baby seal skin ribbon with a more humane, synthetic brand. For me, it is bringing the fun back to the writing process.

Now back to the subject of grit. Cojones, if you will. It is a characteristic virtually annihilated by wussy computers. Take for example, that everything I’m putting down here cannot be edited on the fly. It requires a much greater leap of faith to be opening my mind willy-nilly to the record, in so unfettered a way as this. There is no longer the possibility of restructuring my lines so that they make any logical sense. I am wholly responsible for knowing how to spell (and it is no easy thing to do in this age of automatic spell-checking). Perhaps most significantly, there is no animated dog or paper clip character politely demanding to help me reset my margins because, in the eyes of one of Microsoft Corp.’s virtual minions, my “humor” column is shaping up to look like a legal document. Well maybe so, but I don’t need it rubbed in my face. Not by that, thing.

So my story (and I am sticking to it) is that it is sometimes the aesthetic which is overlooked in favor of the purely practical. For me it has something to do with an effort to recreate the visage of a bygone time and place. I’m paying practical (or else impractical, for you pundits) homage to all the indisputable examples of greatness which burgeoned in the age of the typewriter; for example, many of you fine readers out there. And since the majority of awe-inspiring masterpieces were written first by hand, followed closely by the ancient typewriter (typus manualis, as I understand it), and only very recently on a computer, I consider myself among the elite.

At last I can sit down here, in my nostalgic root-cellar headquarters, surrounded by the scent of curing thyme and freshly butchered leg of lamb hanging from every corner of the ceiling, at my freshly greased typing machine, and get it on with very little down time. In fact, What you might call clumsy and arcane, I call liberating. Hot damn! The whole table is shaking in agreement.