My Old Remington Noiseless

I love sitting at my desk and pounding on the keys of my manual typewriter. There is no spell check or annoying grammar underlines saying: Fragment (consider revising). Hell, I even refuse to use white-out. I let out the venom there and can't put it on facebook or in this blog. By the way, when will these word programs recognize facebook as a legitimate word?  Blog is recognized... what gives?
The old Remington... I stopped using it for a while when I first began posting on facebook. It got stiff from being idle. I cleaned it and oiled the moving parts but it still jammed in mid-page. So I just pounded out regardless and hit the space-bar when it jammed. It is working again. Not as well as it once did but I now know that all I have to do is use it... lovingly.

It is a beautiful machine. Every part is mechanical and moves in accordance with simple but direct mechanical principle... like a pre-computerized automobile. A can still look under the hood of my 1989 Mazda B2200 truck and figure out what is going on with almost every part. I can't do that with the 2011 KIA I rented last year. The Mazda (actually a Ford) still works! Nothing in it is obsolete... yet. 23 years old and still works. My Remington is circa 1930 something and  still works. My Dell is almost obsolete as I write. It barely functions now. In a couple of years it will be a worthless piece of plastic and silicon that will have little or no nostalgic value.

I'm just griping after pounding on the keys of my Remington. My first few words of this blog resumed the energetic pounding this keyboard. The bold print of pounding with more of a whack is now replaced by going to the top of the page with my cursor and clicking the B. No enthusiasm... no physical exertion... just click... and that is how anger is expressed by the kid in his room at mom and dad's expense or credit account clicking away on blog rants, comments and facebook posts. I, for one, prefer the exercise of a manual typewriter before I vent. Am I alone with this fetish?

Why Do I Write?

Winter Wear

Always a good consideration... I have to ask myself these kinds of questions from time to time: Why do I write?" What am I trying accomplish? Are there readers who would read what I write? It isn't as though I think I have anything profound to say. If there is something that resonates... that's what I aim for... resonating frequencies. I want to see my words and say... ahhh, at last I've gotten it out... at last there is a mark on the page that meets with someone else's imagination. So I write crazy shit about crazy shit thinking that maybe it matters and send it out to meet rejection after rejection from publishers and agencies... forever hoping someone will pick it up and put the damned thing in on the bookshelves somewhere.

Reading what others like me have gotten published inspires and then depresses  me. I return to the keys and the empty page, setting out to find my joy, and I clack away at the tapper-rapper (my daughter used to call it)... never-minding punctuation and grammar... spell check takes care of the rest. Remembering when I began my first novel... how I tried to start it... how many times I made mad stabs at the beginning... how to tell the tale... nope, that won't work... put it aside... pause... go back at it and then half way through those first images I portrayed something happened and it clicked. I knew I was writing that novel I dreamed of... the words followed the story. I was no longer trying to be witty or something I wasn't. I was opening up old wounds... and joys... remembering what I knew... observations of experiences... creating characters and places I've seen and wanted others to see them through eyes of their own.

In the winter months it never gets to cold here... rarely below freezing. I get up early... before the morning light of the sun rise paints the mountains with its cadmium tints... don't turn on the heat... put on cheap cotton gloves with the fingers cut out and warm moccasins on my feet... sweat-shirt and pants with a hot cup of coffee... Oh, god, how I love it before my lady rises. Quiet, alone with my muse... she leads me. I realize in these time why I write... why I write ... why I write.