It dawned on me this morning that I hadn’t posted to my blog in a very long time. Since the pandemic swept across the nation more than a year ago, I started posting daily - making daily posts to One Typed Page, a website set up by Daniel Marleau to give us a chance to post our daily experiences and feelings. It was a means to journal daily and vent our worries, fears and even joys as we crawled our way through the viral scourge.
My last post was in May of last year. I was on my way to work and a couple of deer and a rabbit were loitering in my backyard looking for some munchies. They were oblivious of me and certainly had no fears of a virus, racism or the political failings that the country was faced with. Moments like these give me hope that the future is not bleak and that no matter how bad things may seem, they are not so bad that nature doesn’t carry on. I suppose we have a lot to learn from the simple creatures on this planet. Conversely those animals might see us as the simple creatures. We are so wrapped up in ourselves that we don’t see the big picture.
So, to catch up, this blog is for typospherians to write using a typewriter to create their personal news or stories. Generally we will do so by scanning the typewritten page and submitting it up for all the world to see. But, sometimes we write with tools that can’t be scanned. Although I do the majority of my writing using a mechanical device that rivals me in age, and sometimes my parents too. I have a few more modern devices that allow me the same undistracted freedom without the use of paper. Two such devices are the Alphasmart Neo and the Freewrite. They are connectible. In fact, these words can’t be posted without the use of the internet. The same goes for the neo. To post, I have to make a physical connection with a cloud service so that I can access my words and post them publicly. In the case of this device, I have to do nothing. If it sees a connection it automatically streams my words to the storage platform of my choosing. From there I can upload my words raw, or edit them and submit a cleaned copy. The beauty of this is that I get the same undistracted experience. I can’t make edits as I go except to fix the last word I typed by backspacing over it and typing in the correct word. Not unlike my typewriter. No idea if I misspelled a word. I can fix those later. No moving through my test to insert, move or otherwise modify my text. I just write.
Does this qualify as a typewriter? Well, no, not in the technical sense, but it does qualify in purpose. Another nice feature is that I don’t have to be bothered with monitoring the end of a page and inserting a new sheet of paper. I can do that with a thermal typewriter, but I still have a lot of faffing about with a roll of paper and in the end I have to figure out how to scan something that long onto this blog.
So, I will leave it at that. This is my first post in nearly a year and I am confident that my submission will be met with the same acceptance as if I had whacked it out on a Royal KMG.
Peace to all, be healthy and proceed with caution through the viral morass.
