write write write.
words words words.
all day.
can I do it?
nothing but walls of text, nothing but the chatter of keys.
I remember a computer disc filled with words, acres of ramblings flushed from my head during a transitional time in my life. It was early 1993 when I lied my way into a temp job at a midtown company and quickly found myself overachieving at the tasks at hand. I worked 15 hour days for a few months, sucking up overtime and greeting each day with dollar signs in my eyes. I was, in truth, only treading water financially, for it would be a decade before my student loans and credit cards were paid and I reached what I consider the only true feeling of wealth, which is $0 in debt.
In those days I filled the computer screen with the job at hand — usually 300-page word processing documents of tremendous importance to “The Business”. The content of those epic presentations never reached deeper into me than the tips of my fingers. Then, as now, this seemed like a good fit for the job, a separation of form and function which prevented editorializations or “corrections”.
In a teeny-tiny-invisible window at the corner of the screen, too small even for me to see, was a separate document, saved directly to a removable floppy disc. I could not see the words as I typed them and I rarely went back to re-read, but I felt I was capturing something of value, if only to myself. That disc is probably the first office supply I ever stole. New computers these days do not even include floppy disc drives unless specifically requested, their usefulness usurped by removable devices of exponentially higher capacity, but I remember the feeling of piracy and un-traceability when I saved my writings straight to the removable disc, by-passing the hard drive. I imagined (perhaps incorrectly) that this technique left no evidence of my personal ramblings and the amount of paid company time spent writing them.
I burned long hours filling that disc with the ramblings and fascinations of my days. There were good stories, bad stories, none-stories, but I treasured this sui generis account such that when some unknown, unintentionally executed DOS command caused everything on the disc to be permanently deleted I felt I had lost a testicle, lost some lung function, insouciant inner workings permanently replaced by aggravation and an enduring distrust of software.
Who can know what was on that disc? Its content was likely of low value to anyone, anyone, and I mean anyone but my very self. I felt like the ramblings came from a time of my life about which I had fantasized since childhood: Working long hours at a Manhattan skyscraper, the entire office floor (and, as far as I was concerned, the entire 50-story building) all to myself for many of those hours, learning how to have a job and getting around unnoticed in the city to which I moved so that I could be invisible. Relying on nothing from my formal trainings or years of school I think that those days meant more than all the years of school combined. For days on end I reported to that building, eating, shitting, napping, but never showering. I, of course, did that at home, but I thought about bathing there when I found the showers one night while wandering about the building. I never used the corporate showers. Only Executives had shower privileges. Some day, I thought, I’ll be an Executive, and I’ll shower all day long on the company pipe.
The disc is gone. No, wait, the disc itself, the physical matter, that little thing stayed around for years as I imagined finding a forensic technology or skill which would allow me to recover the content. But no. The disc stubbornly reported 0 bytes, 0 documents, 0 0 0 until I lost sight of it. Today I have no idea where that thing is.
I wrote with the wind in those days but now the lifestyle is different. Those writings came from distraction and a need for intellectual balance between work and reality. I also enjoyed the mental gymnastics of learning word processing software, manhandling words and synaesthesiating text in ways I fantasized about since the first time (and, essentially, the last time) I smoked pot. On a Spring Break college day I, high, saw words race around the room with flames and colorful flourishes trailing behind, words dribbling from peoples’ mouths, assuming shapes and contours to express their meaning in ways not possible with type-written text.
In my personal ramblings, though, I just wrote straight text. The psychedelic WordArt text-on-steroids fun was what made the high-tech-typist job of Word Processor Operator so much fun for a couple of years until HTML heralded the next frontier for that sort of thing.
Around the time I left that job a photographer friend took some pictures of me outside the building.
I can’t believe how skinny I used to be.
Writing was a distractional flourish while at corporate but writing today, should I choose to do it, is a dedicated pursuit. With no reason to write and no direction once I start I rely on inspiration, that mercurial stuff which arrives rarely and usually provides little of substance. Sometimes I imagine writing from my vast worldly experience but in those stores of anecdote I find dusty, cluttered closets of needfully forgotten detritus.
I noted my vulnerability to distraction (or perhaps it was noted for me) in the 2nd grade when, for one year, I attended a public school in Tampa that had massive classrooms housing hundreds of students and multiple grades. The building was round. From the 2nd Grade part of the room I looked down the sideways-arcing horizon and saw the 3rd Grade, the 4th Grade, the 5th Grade. Like a young Cage-ian I found myself listening to this infinite and noisy space, simultaneously hearing teachers and student in other classes as the sounds and activities rippled across each other in the weirdly distraction-inducing acoustics.
Today my distractions are mostly self-congratulatory. I shall sit and play piano for 3 minutes, signifying nothing. I shall communicate pithy observations via some electronic means. I shall walk aimlessly from here to my post office box and then back. I shall suffer lightly.
…1 hour later, speaking of distraction, I showered and read some poetry. Thinking about my “vulnerability to distraction” in Grade 2 I find that this particular character flaw could be more optimistically assayed. Maybe I thrive on distraction, and concentrate best when I have something to shut out. To wit, I have lately revived my habit of writing in public spaces, using a pocket-size full-size keyboard to type into the relatively tiny screen of my cell phone. I did this for years before taking an enforced hiatus (the old keyboard broke into pieces). I found the change in environment liberating — maybe a little too liberating. Sitting in public with noise and people to ignore has a way of driving my mind into overdrive, and the tiny size of the cell phone’s screen seems like a point of focus compared the counterproductive distractions so abundant at desktop and laptop setups. At a shit-hole dive bar I found myself typing into the tiny screen of my Treo, pouring torrid and potentially embarrassing accounts from my post-father-suicide meltdown which happened to intersect at the time with other sources of emotional exhaustion. Like that nearly-invisible corner into which I typed onto the long lost removable computer disc the medium of the little screen freed me to type up towers of text on a space so small the words disappeared from before my eyes almost as soon as they arrived.
All day long the land line phone here rings. I have not answered the phone in years, as the calls are virtually always intended for someone who had the number long ago and still owes someone a lot of money. These automated debt collectors used to leave robotic messages on the answering machine but that is not possible any more. The answering machine is full. This is because the Bloomberg campaign, during the last mayoral election, kept badgering voters like me with obnoxious recorded messages imploring one and all to vote vote vote. Unlike Bloomberg’s resource mine are finite, and the answering machine no longer can take messages because their campaign robo-called so many times that it stuffed my answering machine to the gills, making it impossible for anyone else to leave a message. I could delete the messages but I have left it in state as a museum piece of sorts, all the unanswered incoming calls serving as a museum piece of sorts for the Bloomberg campaign. I did vote. I voted for his opponent, whose name I honestly can not even remember but for whom I voted after discovering that Bloomberg had helped itself to using every last bit of space on my answering machine, the last ugly gasps of a tasteless campaign which pitted lowly citizens downwind from a spew of desperate spending. Now the phone rings and rings all day as errant debt collectors toil away, looking for a woman whose last name is Cruz but finding no opening for communication here.
Hah, the phone rang three times, commencing its trio of rings right as I hit the period at the end of the last sentence. Sometimes I check the caller I.D., usually finding that the incoming caller’s number is blocked, but occasionally I see that the National Rifle Association had called. At first I thought this rather unlikely communication from them to me had a connection to my father’s membership in that organization, but cursory web searches show that it seems to be cold calling and possibly Do-Not-Call-Violating telemarketing/fund raising.
My father’s N.R.A. membership surprised me when I discovered it about a year after he died. I drove his car from Florida to New York and, after having the car in New York for many months I one day noticed an N.R.A. sticker in one of the rear windows. The window was tinted and the sticker barely visible, but I wondered if anyone I knew had seen this? If so, did they assume I was a member of that organization?
I was less intrigued by that possibility then in understanding what might have drawn my father into joining the N.R.A. When describing his military service he often stated, proudly, that he never carried a gun in 30 years of service. He used that bit of information as part of his speech to get me to join the military after high school, assuring me that combat duty was not a guaranteed part of military service. As far as I know he never fired a weapon until the moment he died, so his membership in the N.R.A. might have been a “statement membership” motivated by something other than his personal right to bear arms.
I just looked out the window and saw the sun come out. Thunderstorms have not materialized as breathlessly promised by radio weather reports.
I get tired of looking at my reflection in the computer screen. This face of idleness, of dullardry, of ritual passage of time and life.
Did we see our faces in older monitors? The CRTs with the curved screens?
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