Wormwood & Underwood

I am old enough to know how to change the ribbon of a typewriter — like not even an electric one, a legit manual typewriter that has written crime novels, has a lever that advances to the next line, is scarred with cigarette burns and smells subtly of wormwood and sugar cubes.

Would I want to write on one today? Maybe for a page. I don't smoke, have a fedora, or drink absinthe, so the allure just isn't there like it coulda been in my youth. Nyah, see, here's lookin' at you kid. Anything more than a page, I think I'd be annoyed.

The one thing that would be a relief would be typos and the absence of squiggly-coloured lines telling me that I'm writing wrong. I think some of the best lines ever written would never make it past Clippy or Grammarly and then where would we be?

Some of the best things I've ever written were because I ignored the temptation to allow "rules" to get in the way of what I meant to say. I'm certain that Hunter S. Thompson would have lit Microsoft Word on fire, if not by his words, definitely by some kerosene and a lit cigarette.

Bukowski and Vonnegut and Kerouac. Smouldering pile of "Word Processors" at their feet, I'm sure. Word Processor. Like a VEGAMATIC™ but for prose. Underwood made a "Writing Machine" called Underwood No. 1 — the first "Front-Stroke" typewriter that allowed writers to see what they were typing. This was the way of Kerouac and Thompson. Clacking away, not caring what they were writing, thumbing their noses at the very idea of seeing their ideas born to the page.

The experience of tracking, leg-hold trapping, and skinning the words was the point. Not stuffing and mounting them.

Tough to throw an Underwood across the room. Kill people with it, sure, but clear your desk in a fit of artistic passion? You're more likely to dislocate your shoulder and herniate a disc. I suppose this is why the cigarette burns. Smash back your favourite poison, stab your cigarette into the keys, and throw your fedora across the room in a fit of self-loathing as you push away from your writing desk. Heavy castors on your writing chair digging grooves into the pine plank floor.

That is how you write.