A Pilgrim’s Digression

Just to provide fair warning, I am going to be leaving for a fishing trip to Ontario at the end of the week; Friday to be exact. I probably won’t blog anything past Wednesday, however. I will be away from the computer from Friday June 24th through Monday July 4th, returning on Tuesday the 5th.

I am leaving quite a bit of unfinished business behind, namely my novella “Rented Space.” Almost as soon as I set a new deadline for publishing further installments, I broke that deadline. I did not publish last Wednesday. I doubt I will publish this Wednesday, though I may surprise myself. I have quite a few handwritten pages that at some point I need to type up.

Under normal circumstances, I don’t hand write anything anymore, but my wife has been using my iBook pretty heavily, and so I’ve been virtually computer-less except at work.

Funny how things turn out. When I was in High School, and during my undergraduate years, I always made handwritten drafts first, typing these up as a part of revisions. In High School, I even used an ancient Royal manual typewriter that an elderly friend of my Grandparents had given me. That thing was an enormous chunk of iron so heavy it made my little plywood-and-wood-veneer desk wobble with the weight. But I liked using it. It made me feel like Barton Fink, though even his typewriter was more portable than mine.

I doubt my parents much appreciated me using it, considering I did a lot of typing at night.

In college I used a Brother word processor my parents bought me from Wal-Mart. It served me for many years, though by the end of my undergraduate years I had grown tired of how it took one whole ribbon to print a ten or twelve page term paper.

My first computer was little better. I used money I earned at my part-time job, plus an income tax refund, to buy a Packard Bell PC running Windows 3.1. What a dreadful, but expensive, piece of junk that was. I even remember the salesperson purposefully steering me towards it and away from the few Macs the store was offering for sale.

“There isn’t any software for the Macintosh. You want a PC,” he said.

Ugh. What a bald-faced lie.

My worst experience with that PC was, as usual, printing. It came with an old dot matrix printer that had to be fed paper one sheet at a time by hand. My last year as an undergraduate, I had to write a ten or twelve page paper for an Asian Religions class I was taking. I can’t even remember the subject of the paper at this point, but it was probably on a Buddhist interpretation of some piece of western literature. I can’t recall.

I stayed up until two AM printing out that paper, feeding paper to the printer sheet by sheet. My girlfriend, now my wife, slept on the couch while bleary-eyed I finished this awful work. Then near the end of the printing, the ink ribbon ran dry.

I ended up driving to a 24 hour Kinkos with my paper on disk. It was nearly three A.M., but a surprising number of other undergraduates were also at Kinkos finishing late papers. I gave my disk to the guy at the counter and asked for a print copy of the paper on it.

A long time later, he hands me a sheaf of about forty pages with nothing on it but gibberish and says, “That’ll be $36.00.”

“What is this?” I say.

“I think the computer had trouble reading that file,” he says. “What program did you use to write it?”

“Microsoft Works,” I said.

“Oh, you see, that’s the problem. Our computers don’t have Microsoft Works installed, only Microsoft Word.”

“But I can’t use this,” I said, referring to the stack of gibberish in my hand.

“Well, that was quite a few clicks off our printer to print that out. We have to charge you for it.”

I said, “Why didn’t you stop the printer when you saw it was printing gibberish?”

He said, “Hey, you told me to print the file. I printed the file.”

I argued with him a little more, finally settling for paying him ten dollars for the gibberish if he would find a computer that could print out my paper. And do you know what computer he used to print it?

A Macintosh.

That was truly a moment of revelation in my life. Microsoft had created a product, Microsoft Works, which it shipped with all of its consumer-grade versions of Windows. Yet its professional word processing software, Microsoft Word, could not read files created by the sibling program, Microsoft Works. It took a Macintosh to read the file. Because of its underdog status, the Mac had to be compatible with everything, and it read my Works file and printed out a clean copy for me.

A few months later, in August 1996 when my girlfriend/future wife was finished with school and had found her first job, we pooled our resources and bought our first computer, a Macintosh Performa.

I admit I was not a fully converted Macintosh devotee at that point. I was on my way to becoming one, based on the Kinkos experience, but I wasn’t there yet. It was only after about a month of regular use of the Macintosh that I became convinced of its superiority. Ever since then, I’ve always said that if you can replace someone’s PC with a Mac for one month, they will never go back.

Right now, I use a 14 inch, white iBook I bought back in January. I am not running the latest version of OS X�I am still using 10.3—but I plan to upgrade sometime this summer, perhaps after I return from Canada in July.

I do all my writing on the iBook. The only handwritten documents I create anymore are my diaries. I tried using a program called MacJournal for awhile, and it worked fine. Better than fine, actually. But I can’t quite accustom myself to journaling on a computer. Maybe one day that feeling will change. For a long time, I could not accustom myself to writing anything on a computer. Now I hand write virtually nothing.

A pen or pencil no longer feels comfortable in my hand. My hand weakens quickly. My handwriting degenerates after barely one page, and I start leaving out connector words such as “and” and “the” because I want to write quicker. I can’t write as fast as I can type. It is frustrating.

However, the one thing I like about handwritten documents, as opposed to word processed documents is that revision of handwritten documents is obvious. When word processing a piece of writing, unless one saves multiple drafts of a work in progress there is finally only one draft, a final draft. That is disconcerting to a writer who knows that a “final” draft is but an illusion.

With “Rented Space,” I’ve experimented with different ways to keep the process visible. I am publishing on-line, for one thing, and the on-line version sometimes differs from my Microsoft Word version. Also, if I make changes to the on-line version, I try to make this obvious using the “strike” tag.

For awhile in Microsoft Word, I was using the “Track Changes” feature for awhile, but this was confusing and did not exactly serve the purpose I desired. It was invented for people in corporate environments who collaborate on documents.

Now I simply save a new copy with every chapter or two. It creates an excessive amount of similarly-named files, but at least it preserves “drafts” of the work as I progress on it. I don’t know whether that is valuable or not, but to me it effectively allows me to see what I’ve done. The problem is making sure that I only make changes to the most current draft. If I change anything in a previous draft, but not the current draft, the change is probably lost. I’ll forget about it. So I always have to make sure I am working from the most current draft.

Maybe it’s more trouble than its worth. Readers never see the process of writing anyway. I do this only for my own benefit. And I still don’t even know if “Rented Space” is something I can finish or not.

Every day, every week, is a test of whether I have spent my forward momentum. I read brilliant novels like Ellis’s American Psycho, and I think to myself, “I will never write anything as good as this,” and I start thinking my own writing is just pointless. Why go on with it? I’m not that good. I’m wasting my time.

And then somehow I find myself getting on with it. I don’t know how or why I continue to write. Nevertheless, somehow I still find myself writing after all these years, after all the disappointment, after long periods of giving up on myself.

I am now a thirty-year old man writing a novella about a sixty year old man. It’s as if having wrote nothing during my twenties, I have bypassed all the usual stuff that young writers write, the bildungsroman, the sex-and-drugs road trip novel � la Kerouac, the angst-ridden, brilliant young man novel � la Salinger, and instead I’ve skipped right to my own “Death of Ivan Ilyich,” the kind of thing writers write at the end of their life and career.

Funny how things work out. Ten years ago, I was an unmarried undergraduate English major unsure of what the future held for him. Now I am a thirty year old married professional unsure what the future holds for him. I could not have imagined anything of what has happened to me, least of all that during my twenties I would write nothing of importance only to come to some kind of maturity at thirty. At twenty, I still thought I would at any moment break through my writers block and start writing Ellis-like sharp, young novels. It never happened.

Now it seems to be happening, all but the sharp, young novels. “Rented Space” seems to me a very old kind of fiction, though not exactly mature, either. I find myself wondering things like, “Would a sixty year old man still masturbate?” Who knows. But that reminds me of an old joke.

A young man goes to a priest and confesses having committed sins of the flesh. As always, the priest is guiltily eager to hear this particular young man’s confession because his sexual exploits are so varied.

The young man asks him, “Father, when will my passion cool? I can’t bear to live in sin like this for the rest of my life. Will I stop being so lustful when I’m fifty?”

The priest answers, “No, when you’re fifty you have to be wary of the mid-life crisis which causes many good men to stray. I’m sure I’ll still be hearing these kinds of confessions from you then.”

“Will I be less lustful when I’m sixty?” The young man asks.

“At sixty, you’ll be just as lustful as at twenty, but you’ll need all your medicines to be able to go through with it. Be sure to come to me for absolution from any sins of lust you may commit.”

“What about at seventy? Will my lust have dissipated at seventy?”

The priest thought a moment and said, “No, not at seventy, nor eighty. But look, past sixty, I don’t want to hear about it. You have my permission to confess directly to God.”

Enough digression. I’ll write again in July, if not sooner.