Day 963, January 31, 2023

Keyboard Dreams or Analog Arpeggios

Sometimes your fingers get used to a thing, a particular computer keyboard, for example, and to shift to a new keyboard suddenly feels foreign and encumbers a whole slew of different mistakes than one is usually accustomed to. I am finally replacing my 2012 desktop with a new version, and the old one will be rotated into a new role as a writing machine in my son’s room/study. 

In anticipation of this pending change, I have ordered replacement input peripherals for the AA powered keyboard and mouse I’ve kept up with all these years. For the keyboard I decided to try a newfangled-retro-mechanical keyboard. It is something that harkens back to my original Mac, the one after the Apple IIc in a beige case with a 9” monochrome screen. Can you believe we ever looked at such a small screen and composed papers on such things? The keyboard of my memory was a chunky thing tethered to the Mac with a coiled telephone cord. Am I imagining that? Was it really a coiled cord like the handset of a telephone? The keyboard had a satisfying clack. It made one feel productive. It made one feel like you were accomplishing something, and if you were listening to music loud on the stereo, it was almost like you were playing an instrument.

When I was in graduate school, I lost an entire draft of my thesis when the hard drive for my MacBook (the one with a little hard trackball) died. It was my first hard drive death and I took it badly. For an entire year I swore off computers and only wrote on a typewriter. It was a clumsy transition at first, and since I was using a flea market Underwood, there were no corrections, I just backed over and XXX’d out typos. Sometimes the platen didn’t advance evenly, and the paper fed crooked, but eventually I learned to adjust and compensate, my fingers grew stronger and used to the ergonomics of a steeply inclined slope, and I began to program my brain with a reward every time I reached the margin and the bell rang, and I relished the gleeful zip as I returned the carriage.

Even after I returned to computers, this time a devoted backup fanatic (so many floppy disks, Zip drives, CD-ROMs, and eventually a cemetery of hard drives), I kept up with the typewriters, mostly for poetry. I even had one in my office at the college and between meetings with students, teaching classes, and grading papers, I might work on a poem, compose a letter.

The typewriters are retired now, ribbons all dry and threadbare, the rubber parts dry and cracked. Maybe one of these days I’ll restore one, or have it restored. 

So, it was in this vein that I ordered the mechanical keyboard, the one that harkened back to that first Mac keyboard with the coiled telephone cord. This one is cordless, of course, and can illuminate the keys if one wanted such a thing, for some reason. I think I read today that you can set the keyboard to throb with illumination. I have turned it off for now. The keys feel substantial and chunky, like building a castle using Lego Duplo blocks instead of the regular size ones. There are little feet to angle the rear of the keyboard, and I have those deployed. There are subtle differences from my old standard short throw keyboard that confuse me a little bit, a row of F-buttons on top, and a column of buttons labeled with functions I don’t understand on the right, that mainly serve to throw my aim at the top right corner delete causing something entirely different to occur. 

I am starting to adjust. My new computer still hasn’t arrived, but I connected the keyboard to my work laptop since I was working from home today. For a few moments while working on an email, I felt that familiar rhythm return. There was a flow to the plastic beat. There was an uninterrupted paragraph without errors. If only there were nubs on the F and J keys, it would be perfect. Well, nearly perfect. It is pleasing to hear that sound again and I look forward to composing something different than work emails and spreadsheet cells on it, when the time comes.

Lunar light