AlphaSmart 3000 Entry #4: LAX Departures

so...I took this thing out again. I took it out by accident; not by accident, really, but as part of a sub-optimal packing strategy that was sub-optimal mainly in that it, this thing, is a giant f'ing hunk of chonky plastic in a world (my bag. in this framing, the world is my bag) of sleek chrome.

It's the "a" key that's worst, mainly. Bad key to be worst. Well the "a" key and all the other keys. Like my hands are tired already.

I should write about something. I really should write about something. I have like...literally two- or three-dozen half-written blog posts on the Blogger server, here "right here" in cyberspace terms which are the terms under which you are reading this thing O MY GOD THIS "A" KEY but not, as this freaking A key demonstrates, the terms under which I am writing.

It's a very powerful feeling, in fact. A powerful feeling in a preposterous fucking package I mean this thing is BSURED. Which by the way is what happens, apparently, when you attempt to type "a b s u r d" on this ridiculous contraption.

BUT I am, as you can probably tell, readerfriend, also in a sense in love with it already. Because of what I mentioned...some amount of text above, I can't tell because as I mentioend in the first round of entries the AlphaSmart 3000 features 4 lines of let's count them it's one of those screens where each character occupies  a dot-matrix square
four lines of
123456789012345678901234567890123456789040 characters
4 lines of 40 characters each
is what I can see.

So also, and this is fun, it feels like I've written a lot! When really I've not written very much t ll! What a delightful ruse! I am like a small child who, imagining himself having undertaken some bold & marvelous journey, is full of the wonder of exploration and perhaps a little bit puffed-up in the chest re: himself. When really he's gone a bit further up the hill that slopes up from his backyard, a small hill that while yes it is wooded is really just a lightly wooded shrubbed interstitial area between his family's house and their neighbor's house, which is plainly visible and reawlly not that far if you just look up the unobstructed road of 4 Quarry Lane.

That's an address where I lived and that kid was once me I was aMAZED at this cave I once found it was like a dark interior of more than I could imagine and the whole f'ing thing was I think a LITERAL stone's throw (perhaps not a stone thrown by me, at that age; but a grown person's stone's throw) from my familiar backyard.

That is me on this keyboard, that makes everything hard.

But that is CONNECTED TO NOTHING.

A couple procedural notes I've been storing in MY backround memory and want to write before I lose. Nothing happens when you hit CTRL+backspace on this keyboard; i.e., you don't delete words whole-words at a time. Nor does CTRL+[arrow] move yo uwords at a time. This is a word processor in a _lesser sense even_ than that football game with the red dots that I had as a kid that we all had as kids and that is now apparently in that big sequel (o k) was a video game.

If you followed that sentence, bravo. I barely did. I'm baerly following any of this. I'm NOT following any of this.

I'm off to a really great weekend with friends for a life-event of one of the best people I know, who is marrying a woman I have every reason to believe merits someone like him. It's very joyful. I'm a little anxious about not getting writing done, especialy because I haven't been as productive this week as I might've for REASONS that I may someday write about but that are right now too raw/proximate.

The other procedural note I wanted t omake [my hands are TIRED, fam] is that when you hit CAPS lock how it lets you know CAPS is on is that the rightmost square on the bottom line (which is the line where your words appear as you type, obvs), so position 40 on the bottom line just goes dark: black rectangle. So you know CAPS IS ON.

I don't think I'm-- well no I'm OBVIOUSLY wasting time. But I don't think I'm "just" "wasting" "time" circling around the one point that I guess I am going to make before signing off here -- I really do imagine myself just talking to you, _you_, and that's really pleasurable, sitting here writing at Gate 51B at LAX on my way to this really fantastic weekend where maybe (probably) I won't get enough writing done.

My phone is charging far away from me and that makes me slightly anxious.

OKAY but I was saying I don't think I'm just circling around the one point as like a ploy or a joke or an annoying thing; it may be annoying but that's not my like...not waht I mean to be doing.

I think this weird perorating twittery nonsense is like a demonstratio nof the point that I'm making, which is the kind of EXTRAORINDARY (black rectangle, end of the line) change and liberation that comes with no internet. It's not...because this thing is not a laptop with the internet turned off. I can do that. And, unless things are going badly--I'm in a distracted environment, or truly in no state to be writing--...checking the internet a lot is not a problem for me, as a writer. I know that's a cliche writer problem. I am a cliche in lots of ways, no doubt, but not that one. I don't have a hard itme just sitting there doing it.

But this is so much more. Because this cannot will not could never be more than i tis, which is this RIDICULOUS hunk of etch-a-sketch plastic I mean look at the pic that i'll embed somewhere in this entry, it's this completely absurd little machine from a different era of hardware sure but it also feels more profoundly different than that. It feels, looks like a  TOY. Like a framice. A _device_. A thing unlike the things that we use now to connect to the whole world all the time; to put words together; to share them.

But it can do words! Not very well -- these f'ing keys. But it can do them! In fact that's all it can do so it has (I suppose) a comparative advantage in that. And I'm so pleasantly tired here, doing words on it, talking to you, like being alone with you in a pleasantly dim room and we're talking; and we're not ALONE ore ABANDONED but we are, maybe, secluded; maybe we're the las tones at the restaurant and there's no rush to get out, or we're at the campsite and the nearest tents are fifty meters away down the lakeshore, their fires like ours burning down into embers. This device feels like that in a fluorescent airport departure lounge, slight patinas of anxiety for a distant--charging phone, for a seat not yet given, and STILL it feels like that: a soft, shared space -- you and me, words. Because all it can do, as wonky as it is at doing it, is that.