Perforated Lines (you can't resist 'em!)

(the great American manual)
-- Wednesday, January 26, 2000 --

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7:02 p.m. I'm trying to mend my wicked ways and write a little earlier. I'm even trying to write more than one thing at a time, in the classic style of Isaac Asimov, a most prolific writer.

The legend is that he had many typewriters in his office, on various tables and desks. In each machine was a different project, in different stages of development. I'd assume he also had a nice rolling desk chair, but that's just circus speculation.

Nonetheless, it was said that he simply went from project to project like a bee, working on each as the mood moved him. It's a pretty picture of the perfect working life, I think. It's an image I hold very dear.

It's what I'd hoped my life would be like one day -- no writer's block, a jet-powered rolling chair, and multiple projects all going on at once. Not a minute lost. Feeling contemplative? Spin some lines from your brain right into your autobiography. Feeling combative? Ball up your metaphors and toss some spicy bits into a fresh juicy essay.

Keep those fingers moving and those invoices, rejoinders, footnotes, and addenda flowing. Perfect your autograph and sign your checks with an unreserved flourish.

3:08 a.m. I'm not there yet.

I bought the old typewriter in the photo almost two years ago with the hunched ghosts of Isaac and Dorothy and Ernest and Sylvia in mind. Just in case we had another earthquake and lost power for another stretch. Ostensibly to type out labels and envelopes, but really ... I bought it so I could try to fit back into that blissful but now too-small set of memories of my earliest days making words appear on paper.

A manual. No -- not that kind of manual, and no, there's no manual with it, but the machine basically explains itself. A cute little black Remington Rand from the '40s, and I remember sitting down to such a machine a very long time ago.

I remember teaching myself how to type from one of those nice old do-it-yourself instruction books that flip backward like a steno pad. And since there was no teacher to check up on me, I could look down at my fingers whenever I felt like it and I never really bothered with the numbers. Letters, not numbers, were my chosen gig.

Now, when you use a manual typewriter and you mistype a letter, you're sort of stuck. "Delete" is not an option. You can either rip out the sheet of paper and start all over again or you can leave the typo right there and try to think of a new word to contain it. This is how the bad pun was born.

One of these years, some clever linguist is going to note how writing has changed now that writers don't have the limitations of mechanical type anymore. No more chains on our tires as we go skidding and plowing through the snowy white bleakness of a piece of paper.

The nearly free-fall feeling of working with forgiving, discreet pixels. Matter and antimatter; gravity and hovercraft. Skim and swoop, highlight an entire paragraph of warm-up and zap it away. The perfect-looking future is here, now, beneath my fingers, with the number keys corralled neatly off to the side, and I don't even have to look down anymore because mistakes are instantly erased without a trace.

Oh, and here's something else: on my little ancient portable, it's a Royal pain to make an exclamation! You have to shift, hit the apostrophe, and then back up -- beep beep -- and hit the period! True!!! No wonder they were so dour back then; it had nothing to do with the Big War or the Depression.

No! It was merely the cumbersome mechanics of expression, with dashes nearly perforating the paper, hard-hitting periods actually punching all the way through, the underline definitely scoring the page. Enthusiasm had to be kept to a severe, practical minimum or your eggshell airmail tissue and midnight carbons would be nothing more than riddled, razored shreds.

Ah, the memories. And I've still got all the accessories: slivers of chalky whiteout paper, a dark blue bottle of long-evaporated spirit fluid with a short brown nubby brush applicator, and a clear plastic compact of that tacky gummy gray stuff for mucking the gunk out of the lowercase "a".

I made a lot of mistakes in my typing youth. I was lazy, careless, and altogether too fast. These mistakes created a special subtext that illuminated the manuscripts with significant clues about the typist. Frankly, there were only so many things you could do.

There were the childish, white-sheeted ghosts of the overstrike, for instance. They fooled no one. Or those girlish, never-quite-dry nail-polish blobs of Wite-out, which also came in pink, turquoise, and eggy yellow. Fast-drying in clingy rings around the suction-mouth bottle; never-drying on the page.

And finally, my personal favorite: the insouciant tennis bracelets of strike-over xxxx's. Once I became a hot-shot reporter with no time to spare, these became my m.o. Words abandoned but still visible, remaining like a guilty conscience, under those letters-ex. Ex-lovers, ex-husband, ex-communication quickly followed.

Trying to get rid of the evidence. Back then, mistakes had consequences.

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