Friends,
It’s an overcast afternoon in America’s Overlooked City, and I’ve decided to spend a little time outside, away from the distractions.
Most of those distractions live in my office, of course, including the mountain of half-finished projects. Thank you cards from Christmas, two very broken typewriters, a Zenith SupersPort (yes, the in-cap is correct, strangely. Accent on the “port”) that needs its guts transferred into a DOA Bull laptop, and so much more. I have plenty of time on my hands to do all of these things, I just have a hard time getting from the planning stage to the doing part. It’s not even that any of these projects are difficult. They just need attention and that’s something I don’t seem to be able to muster.
Part of the reason, I think, is simple–I’m having a difficult time focusing on much anything beyond the willful destruction of the American Democratic Experiment at the hands of oligarchs and right-wing white nationalists, all led by a dementia patient who is hell-bent on protecting his pedophile friends.
That’s it.
You’d think I could just get over it and break out the watercolor paint pots, but here we are. People old enough to remember the last right-wing dementia patient in the White House, you know, Margaret Thatcher’s pal, projected their hopes forward for this reality television actor and said, “He’s so mockable come out of this. he’s a clown. So much amazing art is going to come out of this.” While that’s true and creatives have stepped up to fight back visually and through their words, the amount of suffering wrought by the administration of the 47th President of The United States has been logarithmically worse than his predecessors.
So what can be done?
That’s two questions. The first answer is that I’m going to make a solid effort to get this and the next one and the one after that online in a timely manner. I’m also not going to spend too much time mincing words even though the secret police are monitoring communications to determine who should live in a concrete cell in an undisclosed location without due process. (Hyperbole? Ask the reporter from The Atlantic who had her home raided and her devices confiscated for writing an unflattering article.) The next thing that can be done is to try and convince somebody to either file articles of impeachment or invoke Article 4 of the 25th Amendment and remove these people from office. Let’s just hope we won’t have to wait for the midterms in November for that to happen.
While we’re on the subject of distraction-free writing, I really must expand o n the joys of these little battery-operated thermal printers from the 1980s. For the price of four D-cell batteries and a pack of letter-size thermal paper, I can just write and write and write. Letter-size sheets too hard to find? No problem. Eight and a half-inch rolls of thermal fax paper are cheap and plentiful. Type as much as you want and tear off the sheet when you’re done.
I’m scanning these pages and with quick OCR pass, they’re ready to post here. It’s not quick or easy, but it sure is satisfying to actually have a sheet of paper in my hand. This point is also being made online about photography, urging people to pick up cheap photo printers and create more had copies of your art so it isn’t trapped in a computer or on a phone forever.
The argument also holds that when you have a tangible thing in your hand, your art not only has more meaning, but you see if the composition and output is what you had in mind when you took the shot. Pretty handy to help you improve your craft. This doesn’t matter so much if you’re shooting to remember where you parked your car, but that lovely sunset deserves to be on your wall.
Probably.
The satisfaction of holding a piece of paper that contains your work recommends against one of the other “distraction-free” typing
solutions, like the Freewrite or the Alphasmart, which are functionally keyboard buffers with battery back-up. That said, I ordered an Alphasmart Neo to give it a try. People rave about them, so I thought I’d (belatedly) see what all the hubbub is about. They were ubiquitous in school districts as typing tutors, so they’re still pretty cheap on the used market despite going out of business almost two decades ago. The one I ordered has some issues, so I was able to pick it up for a reasonable price. I can fix it, try it out, then sell it again if it doesn’t work out. Who knows. I may end up loving the thing. Maybe it has a better keyboard than the Brother EP-44’s chiclet keys I’m typing on now. Maybe it suffers from the same squishy rubber domes that the Palm Portable Keyboards use. Maybe (please no) it has the same cramped, mushy mess that’s on the Apple Newton eMate 300. All attempts on my part to reach distraction-free writing nirvana. All coming up short.
You know, I have a mechanical keyboard that’s going into retirement that might want to donate its Cherry Brown switches to the project. Hmmmm. ( i remember somebody crying about having too many unfinished projects only a couple of paragraphs ago. -edOkay, that’s fair.)
Well, this has been fun. I’ll need to revisit this setup tomorrow.
Until then, there’s a half-clean pile of dishes to deal with. More later!
Your pal,
bob