typewriter blues

Wake up, slam your palm on the electrical clock with its laser-like digits and curse the beeping sound that created a homicidal robot dog in your dream. Promise yourself that you’ll get a new old-fashioned alarm clock, the kind that puts you to sleep with its gentle ticking to replace this glaring, gleaming plastic monster.
Get ready and check your e-mail. Read the newspaper; maybe get into the habit of just calling it the news. Look away from the screen and remember the times when you would hold those large sheets of paper that rustled in your hands as you read about the world. Feel nostalgic and imagine how you’ll be explaining the concept of a newspaper to children, twenty years from now.
Finish up with classes and get almost magnetically drawn to your computer screen. Check your e-mail again and then Facebook. Think about deactivating your Facebook account. Shy away from doing it. Then, one day, take a deep breath, click on the Deactivate Account link and go through the confirmations and be Facebook-less. Two, maybe three weeks later return from the edge of suicide because of boredom and reactivate your account. Look heaven-wards and thank the gods of technology for saving all your account information and realise that you are but a slave to this machine that stares at you, unblinking.
Stumble upon your small collection of letters and browse through them. Relive the feeling of receiving a letter from your friend, who lives across the world, over summer and realise how much longer you’ll remember the two letters you got even though you got an e-mail almost every other day. Re-read the only letter your father ever sent you, the only time, you think, he actually spoke to you and how he wrote that he wished that telephones and the internet weren’t invented so that people still wrote. Make a mental note, promising yourself that you’ll write to him tomorrow and then forget about it because you sent an e-mail later that night.
Let your mind wander back to the day you were leaving home to travel across the world to receive an education and remember the odd, blue bag that lay on your bed and the surprise as you opened it to reveal a small, portable typewriter. Fish the bag out from the abyss under your bed and set it up on your table, pushing aside the sleek laptop from its place, place a sheet of paper in the typewriter and punch, punch, punch, let the words flow out of you, lend the words a part of yourself, sculpt, chisel, imagine yourself as Michelangelo, invest your entire being to create a piece of art to reflect your passion for writing, punch the wrong letter, grab the whitener and try to undo the mistake, muse on how the typewriter teaches you that mistakes can never just be deleted by tapping a key, breather, put the paper back in and punch, punch, punch, stop thinking, stop breathing, block out the music that your roommate’s iPod is churning out, punch, punch…and look up as your friend walks in and asks you why you can’t be normal and use Microsoft Word like everyone else.