Tempo of the keys..

I developed this obsessive thought about owning a typewriter.  After a memory came about in a dream, of when I was young and my grandfather had come to visit us with one.  My grandpa… we will call him “Paw” as I called him back then.  Paw was a slick back black hair, dressy man, that lived and played to the beat of his own drum.  I always admired that about him.  Just different.  Didn’t seem to give a hoot as to what anyone thought about him.  Anyways.  Paw had worked for a printing press, and would always come home with stationary for us grandkids to scribble on.  Boy was that the most perfect thing for an artistic child to obtain.  I could make my own comic books, pictures and stories for centuries.  An endless supply of paper and pens.  I remember creating our own comic books and and bringing the silliest of characters to life.  The point of my story here was the typewriter, I apologize.  I got a bit nostalgic there.  So I quickly jumped online and found a vintage manual typewriter on ebay.  Without putting much thought into it I pressed the “Buy Now” option with the PayPal info already on record, and two days later voila!  I was sitting at my dining room table pecking away at the sun dyed keys, as if I had known this machine all of my life.  It just began to flow out of me.  I first retyped a blog entry of mine “The Toolbox” (shameless plug)… and it felt so good, hammering away at those keys, watching the typebars flying towards the moving paper with such precision.  It was beginning to sound like heavy rain against a window air conditioning unit, the way that the tapping grew more rapid and clearer into a moderate tempo.  How awesome.  The more I jammed on it, the more fluid it got.  The B key even started to loosen up, for when I had initially struck the B key it had gotten itself stuck, and when I called for the e to be next in the sequence, it only jammed the B even harder.  But now it seemed that I had worked out some of the dust, or warmed up the lubricant that was originally applied in the 70’s.

So I would have to say if you can get your hands on an old manual typewriter, do yourself a justice and spend some time clicking away and see if it brings a smile to your face as it did with me.

Happy writing…

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