Before the keyboard, people wrote by hand. It was a tedious, laborious situation causing whole books to be dictated to willing, and often adoring, secretaries. This served two purposes: saving the writer's wrist while sacrificing the secretary's, and creating companions for high-strung, anxious writers who are often unable to attract others owing to their obsessive behavior around their own thoughts. These secretaries were not, in ways, unlike the mules that are sometimes kept with race horses, useless and beautiful animals outside of the race track that are calmer in the presence of their companion animal.
The problem is, of course, that I have not yet found the desperate soul willing to risk carpal tunnel for me.
Nor am I exactly a race horse.
Still. Where the hell is my mule?
So here I am, screen-less and therefore keyboard-less, forced to write in longhand.
And worse yet, I am web-less.
I used to not know I was web-less. Just as I used to not carry a phone with me at all times, just as I was previously unaware that whole communities of people were finding common ground and catching up on what they've been up to since high school on Facebook.
It's a hard realization, but I have regressed to cromagnon man, scratching mastodons on the wall while one cave over, homo erectus is painting the Mona Lisa.
I've also developed a belief that next I'll be complaining about how I used to be perfectly satisified without personal tanks of scented air or how irritated I am that my Dream Generator is on the fritz and I'm forced to come up with my own.
I think being computer-deprived is starting to affect my mind.
Still, if there's one thing I've learned here -- and I'm all about the learning -- is that I really like to write.
The laptop has been sent to be repaired.
There's nothing I can do but wait.
In the meantime, if I fail to comment, if it seems as if I am not around, please know that I do what I can, when I can and that I'm still here, in Minneapolis, reliving the turn of the century.
Hoping all is well, I remain , keyboard-less and interwebs-free, your faithful blogger, Pearl.
About Bob Dylan
4 days ago
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10 comments:
Sometimes I just go WILD, and leave the house for hours without my phone!!
xxx
Take up knitting and the circle will be complete. There'll be no getting back to Blogland. Goodbye, Dorothy.....
I heard whittling is fun!
Hope they fix that laptop quick!
I just did a post on art of the prehistoric type, and whether you believe in ESP or not, I swear I wasnt aware of your cromagnon art enterprise scratching mastodons.
Maybe you need to try sculpture ? Of vegetables ? With a plate of those on your lap ? So you can imagine its your laptop ?
I have really come to rely on my computer, so I hear ya. I just finished up this course where I had to use a pen and paper. Pen and paper...can you imagine?! ;)
Why not just vegetate for a while ? You could be anything- from a grape to a giant redwood. It might be nice to be a peach ripening in the sun or diversify and be a field of waving corn
Pen and Notepad... the original laptop.
Hmmm, or would that be stylus and clay tablet?
The tools do not make the talent is what I am trying to say, you prove that.
I wrote (!), by hand (!) a three page letter recently. sort of an exercise in the past I guess since I embraced email long before anyone I knew did. My god, I couldn't believe how bad my handwriting has become. Started out nice but by the middle of the second page it had deteriorated rapidly. I just hope she could read it.
Been there, done that, no fun.
Helen
I hate to point this out to you, my dear, but Homo erectus was artless. It was Cro-Magnon man (an earlier type of Homo sapiens), who first developed art.
BUT, I can forgive you, seeing as how you're webless and all.
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