typewriters ii
so, when I was a little boy I discovered a very mechanical device that turned out to be a typewriter, a typewriter with my last name on it! and I worked and worked to get my fingers strong enough to work the shiny buttons which turned out to be keys. and that's when things got complicated. I learned there was a ribbon in there. took me another forever to figure out what the ribbon did. and you had to feed in a sheet of paper whenever you wanted to use the typewriter. feeding in a sheet of paper was easy, but you had to get it in just right. if you didn't get the paper in just square to nothing you could see, then the typewriter would tear the paper up. if you got the paper in but only almost nearly square to nothing you could see, the lines of letters the typewriter made lined up compared to each other but wound up cockeyed on the page. when I finally learned the trick - no there still was nothing you could see to line up the paper with, but there was something you could feel. when the paper was lined up right, it sorta pushed back at you evenly all the way across the bottom of the sheet. whew! then when I finally got paper to feed through correctly, it turned out there were rules. you couldn't just type in endless rows of letters in any order you made up! no! you were supposed to type in words! and only words. and then it turned out you weren't just supposed to type in words, but you had to type in only words only in an order that made sense. like when I wrote a letter to my granddaddy. oh! only when I wrote a letter to my granddaddy I wrote big letters on a small page, so I only had to tell him the latest thing I did that it was okay for my parents to know I did, and tell him I loved him and I'd filled up the page. with the typewriter, you used little bitty letters on a big page, so I had to tell him everything I'd done in a week or more, and make it sound like it was all stuff my parents could know about and I could tell my granddaddy not only how much I loved him but how much I loved the books he kept sending, and how goddamned glad I was that none of them were "Run, Dick, run" books any more! geez! writing a letter was hard work! and it had so many rules! no wonder grownups were crazy! and then a funny thing happened. I could finally use the typewriter, but I didn't have anything to use it for except my occasional letters to my granddaddy! I felt kinda robbed. it wasn't til I got to high school that I could really use it for essays and such. and then another funny thing happened. suddenly it was time to go to college, and I was told I was going to need my own typewriter to take to college with me where I'd use it to type gazillions of papers. so I went to the typewriter store - yes, they still had typewriter stores in 1960 when I graduated from high school - expecting to find very mechanical devices in different sizes and maybe different colors. no, unh-unh, nope. sometime while I hadn't paid attention, everyone else had started using electric typewriters. so I wound up with this little thing about a third the size of my old very mechanical device and it was hardly mechanical at all! it sat there and growled at me all the time I used it. but in a way, that was all right. it turned out that grownups who had told me all about college were just as crazy as grownups had been all along. I studied engineering, then I studied physics. there were no gazillions of papers to typewrite. I typewrote a couple of dozen essays for my English classes, then a few papers in classes like sociology and economics, but almost all my real work was done in math, and my typewriter was useless for math. it was still useful for letters though. especially business letters. and another funny thing happened. we started using computers. I can't remember the last time I used a typewriter.
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