I don’t know if it has to do with getting older, or the fact that using a mouse has totally fucked up my once formidable typing skills, but I can’t seem to type a single sentence these days without totally rearranging the letters, putting word spaces in the wrong place, or typing words that have absolutely nothing to do with what I was trying to say.
Even more embarrassingly, I usually don’t discover it until that split second when I’ve fired off the "post" or "send" button, and it’s everlastingly too late. (Editing? We don't do no steenkin' editing...) Some of these mis-typings are so astonishingly Freudian in nature that it makes me wonder if I need to be in therapy. Some of them have been even more en flagrante delicto than my sister’s typo in the word "count" in what the publisher thought was a family newspaper (or, for that matter, John McCain’s verbal typo when he was talking about tax cuts the other day).
Or, perhaps it’s just indicative of a brain that is jam-packed full of words, words, words from so many years of being a professional typesetter whose totally possessed fingers could burn up a keyboard in a touch-typing frenzy that produced accurate copy at roughly 150 wpm. My sister can relate. She did the same thing.
We both remember with longing the old Harris Intertype keyboard that was attached to HAL, the ancient "computerized" Compugraphic typesetter at the alternative-at-the-time newspaper Creative Loafing in Atlanta, back in the 70’s and 80’s, where we both paid our dues. Said keyboard had no screen and blank keys. It punched a paper tape, which had to be threaded through another thingy in order to flash the letters on photographic paper via a filmstrip that wrapped around a spinning cylinder in the depths of the recalcitrant HAL, who often went bonkers at 3:00 am on deadline day. It was also the fastest keyboard in the history of the Western world with a touch so exquisitely light that we still yearn for it after all these years.
The requirements for being a typesetter in those days included knowing how to wield a soldering iron, while simultaneously communicating, via long distance telephone, with a Compugraphic techie on how to solder in a new timing light so that HAL could accomplish his mission of creating the reams of photographic paper galleys that had to be fed through a processor to develop, then hung to dry before they could be scissored, waxed and pasted up on the waiting flats on long tables in the paste-up room. Deadline day was often a 36 hour affair which led to more than one nervous breakdown and the tendency to consume enormous quantities of medicinal herbs. Not to mention a crazed editor who was known to pull the front page at the last minute because it had what was, in her estimation, a totally unacceptable word like "urine" on it. Ah, those were more innocent times.
You current-day newspaper prep folks are total wusses in comparison.
All that to say, I’m posting a freaking Tip Jar for my first Diary, since I didn’t know I was supposed to do that.
Jeesh, I just realized that this whole post is a total Sunday morning Brain Fart, which, as we know, is Nature’s way of relieving mental flatulence.
Sorry ‘bout that.