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4/15/2006 7:06:43 AM

This day began in Colorado. This day began in Boulder. This day is like no other. This
is the day that once was the Ides of March, perhaps, the 15th, dreaded as tax day in the
United States, but not this year, because it is Saturday, and taxes have been deferred until
the Monday following April 15th, which is the 17th. The day began in Boulder, Colorado
with sun and clear sky and a bit of wind more than whispering through the bare but
budding trees surrounding our house and lining the adjacent golf course.

The view from here westward is of the front range of the Rocky Mountains, which
change dramatically in the light. Today was a golden morning. The eastern faces of
those mountains glowed golden in the early morning sun, then, by seven the sun had
hidden behind clouds, the wind felt surly and cold came, with a mist of the rain that can
turn to snow.

My keyboard has a QWERTY layout, designed when typewriters were made with metal
bars attached to keys that physically struck the page and left an inked imprint there, but
were mechanically cumbersome enough to have to be slowed down, so the keyboard was
made, so says the myth, to accommodate the need to lessen the speed of typing. I have
typed for many years, since Junior High School, and I have become very quick, like the
brown fox, to jump over the keys, so I am not sure I believe the myth. I have seen typists
who could confound the electronics we now use to translate our fingers’ motions into
words. My keyboard, a contrivance which has lasted all these years in nearly the same
form, and soon will go the way of rotary telephones, carbon paper, tickertape,
punchcards, spirit duplicating machines, in favor of voice recognition, is not in front of,
but beside the screen upon which the words it makes, appear. Once upon a time, the
paper was rolled into the typewriter’s platen and it sat blank before the writer, then began
to fill with words one had to consciously ignore or could read without turning from the
keyboard, words that poured out onto the page right before the typist’s eyes. Now, I look
into the garden outside my window, with the irrigation ditch and the trampoline beyond,
and the trees that now sit still, the morning wind having gone elsewhere. The words are
filling the pages from left to right and marching down the screen, but I do not have to
look at them, and they continue their march, inevitable and plodding left to right down
each page that automatically fills and moves on, and then is stored in the memory of my
computer for a time. I do not have to look at the words, just manipulate the key. The
words, which form a marginally coherent pattern on the page, can be interpreted by
anyone who cares to look, but they do not have to be read by my as I type them, aor by
anyone else. The words are stored unread and waiting for someone to take them home.

My computer is, like almost all the computers, connected to the space of an electronic
community that knows no known bounds and has limits that are ruled by the speed at
which electrical impulses can be interpreted by mechanical switches, then only by the
speeds at which electrical impulses travel through our atmosphere, then, by nothing more
than the speed of light, if that. If the words I type are put away in the storage places of
my own computer, and the computer is attached by its electrical umbilical cords to all the
other computers, maybe they can read each other’s stored words and we can just feed the
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machines the words for their enjoyment, and they can mull over what we say, and tell us
where it was we went so wrong in our world that thirty thousand people must die of
starving every day, and people shoot at each other aiming to splatter fragments of lead
pellets into one another’s bodies, and people care enough about something to wear vests
with pockets filled with explosive devices and can feel little enough to detonate those
devices among crowds of other people, and governments carry out atrocities against
entire populations so that commerce can be supported and continued.

The computers reading each the others’ stored words could arrange them in such a way as
to entertain us, revise our offerings into less barbed things, make revisions that a minute
could revise. We could turn from the barbarism of our days and the days behind us.

It is Easter tomorrow, and Jesus will have risen to new heights of hypocrisy in the
Churches that Support the Troops and fuel the madness. They are born again who praise
him all the time, and they have seen the words that were stored so long ago in the stone
tablets of the earliest of typists, scribes with reeds and rolls of papyrus and sheets of
vellum and inks of plant dye and a messianic need to write the words. And, first, there
was the word, and then the word was stored and sorted into files that were passed along
fdrom one to another of the writers in the generations that proceeded us, and the word
was changed and acted on and acted on and changed and suits all the pundits everywhere
in its ubiquity, the word and words to follow.

The computer saves my words, automatically every few minutes. 4/15/2006 7:47:47 AM
I could keep on typing all the day and night and I could keep on inserting dates and times
and ramble on through pages upon pages and stop only when the words ran out, or now.