Manual Typewriters Are Better.

Chip says a lot of poetry is written online these days. A lot of Twitter haiku. Twikiu, for goodness’s sake.

Last night, as I was tucking him in, he held out his cell phone and said, “Write a poem, dad.” Instead, I cracked open my new copy of Walden, turned to Chapter 2, and read:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…”

Chip was asleep in seconds. Sigh.

I’m sticking with my Underwood typewriter. It was good enough for Faulkner, Hemingway, Kerouac and the great E.B. White, it’s good enough for me. Most of the best words in human history were written manually.

All those chisels and brushes and pens and typewriters.

And you know what? A manual typewriter just feels better. When I tap a key, I feel that satisfying punch (CLACK!) of metal on paper. I like feeling the impact of each letter.

Every now and then, I roll out a freshly typed page, turn it over, close my eyes, and run my fingers over those faint and sometimes spiky impressions. Bob’s Braille.

Who needs a laptop, word processor or spell check? I got my Underwood, white out, and a dictionary.

I’m all set.

Comments

Media Jean: What’s white out?

Chip: The label says “Liquid Paper.” Dad uses it to paint over his typos. After it dries, he retypes. It’s sort of like Undo for his generation.

Media Jean: That’s even more work than erasing! Why not just use a pencil? Your dad cracks me up! But the Braille thing sounds pretty cool.

Chip: Yeah, it does feel like Braille. But I like binary better. It’s like seeing the DNA of your thoughts. Try it!

Media Jean: I found a binary-to-text converter online. Here’s “Walden”: 010101110110000101101100011001000110010101101110

Chip: I should make a T-shirt of that for my dad.

Johnny: Would you time-wasters get back to work?!

Media Jean: Hey, Johnny: 01100111 01101111 00100000 01110011 01101111 01100001 01101011 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101000 01100101 01100001 01100100

Johnny: Yeah, yeah, whatever. Just get back to work!

​H​Comic strip from the series "Bob's Blog"
(Kid, Inc. Volume 1: Look Out, Tomorrow, Here We Come!)

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