going back and back

It's late one afternoon at the flea market customers mostly gone home and I'm relaxing in my chair listening to someone in the next booth negotiating the price on an old Royal manual typewriter. Overheard the guy say he wrote for a TV show.  Play the celebrity card. It might be good for a ten dollar discount.  Unimpressed, my neighbor Gerry V.  held his price, the conversation continued.


The writer allowed that he couldn't work on a computer.  ". . . keep going back and back."  Walked away without the Royal.  Probably full of bull about working on the show, but the thing he said about going back and back on the computer stuck with me.

After Windows 95 took over around here everything I learned in college about teaching elementary school kids to write first edit later slipped my mind. The trail of red lines streaking out behind the cursor constantly calls me back and back. Reminds me of third-grade, old lady Cassman looking over my shoulder.

Thought about getting a manual typewriter. Tap away in a paper-strewn garrot room, stubby cigar clenched between the teeth, green vizor, half bottle of whiskey.  Sold a vintage machine to a guy from San Francisco one time told me that's how he lives.  A software engineer by day holes up in his room every night banging out detective novels, cigar vizor whiskey and all - or so he said.  I can't remember if he got an interesting person discount.

These old fingers are too fat and stiff to push keys on the Royal and finding files on a thumb drive is easier than crawling around the floor shuffling through discarded pages especially with these worn-out knees.  Text files don't care about spelling, copy and paste into a Blogger page where the browser extension Grammarly does the grunt work editing.

Running the free version. Weekly email reports in the guise of work summaries encourage me to purchase a premium subscription. At first, they touched the ego with vastly inflated word counts, congratulations on a job well done, then after a few months removing their approval with an equally inaccurate word count of zero - On vacation from writing ... womp womp no writing again this week ... is this editing software or a new girlfriend?

Probably still cobbling together strings of words that don't take pictures in a reader's mind the way I want, but it's a heck of a lot more fun riffing at the keys for a cup or two of coffee at a stretch without constantly being called back and back.