Poem: What I Saw at the IHOP on East Central

"New Mexico, 2021" (In homage to Garry Winogrand's 'New Mexico, 1957')



Yesterday I took a drive up east Central Avenue, here in ABQ. There's nothing I saw yesterday that I haven't seen before, but I wanted to study it, make sense of the enormity of the economic blight that's happening here. Happening, as in present-tense.

I should note, right up front, that our's isn't the only city facing these kinds of problems; just yesterday I was watching a YouTube channel from Toronto, Canada, where the vlogger mentioned the smell of urine behind the trash dumpster behind his apartment building. Or, just walk along the beachfront park in Santa Monica, CA and you'll find it like walking through someone's bedroom, only worse.



The causes are multifold: drug abuse, mental illness, career criminals, professional narco-cartels, marginalized economy, citizen apathy, lack of an effective social safety net, political polarization -- you name it. In cities like Albuquerque, entire geographic districts seem bombed-out, pulled directly from the pages of some distopian futurist novel.

The process seems entirely predictable: local economies decline, businesses leave, vandalism and crime increase, entire streets of strip malls abandoned, homeless encampments arise, shiny black cartel SUVs patrol the 'hood, servicing the heroin and methamphetamine addicts scavenging for their next fix. Meanwhile, politicians pose on-camera for their next real estate deal out in the suburbs, while special interests grease their palms, all covered live by Chopper Five for the six o'clock news. And so it goes.



If the process seems entirely predictable, you'd think the solutions would be also. But they don't seem to be present, to any great degree. Or maybe, we've only seen the tip of the ice berg, maybe it's going to get lots worse. Maybe the bombed-out zone of economic blight, that was once "across town," "not in my neighborhood," suddenly seems a lot closer, as you begin to notice the odor of makeshift bedrolls behind the neighborhood grocery store dumpster, or the litter of heroin needles in the empty lot on your daily walk. Maybe you can fit those ear plugs in, nice and snug, as you retire to bed at night, so as to ignore the police sirens and "ghetto bird" outside.

This last week, the current US administration announced the formal policy of supporting a continued military involvement in the country of Afghanistan was ending. America's longest war is coming to a close, or so the talking heads announced. What I'm wondering is this: what about those bombed-out war zones in our own communities, when are those wars coming to a close? When will we start triaging the wounded? Or, maybe we never showed up to fight, never made any attempt to fix what's broken, at all. Maybe we gave in without even a shot being fired.

I'd like to see what an invasion would look like, if America decided to tackle the war at home, that's been raging for decades, unimpeded.

Those are the thoughts I had, at the IHOP on east Central.

How Come One More?

I think the replacement cloth-covered retro-style power cord adds to the aesthetic, rather than detract, as would a standard black cord. Embrace the wires!



I like the yellowish color to the front bezel. Though I've always thought "bezel" was a funny word.



If this thing's a Singer, and canary-yellow, should it be named after a bird ... Tweety Bird?



A machine to fit into the decor? Perhaps!



As an adult, I don't necessarily need to justify my collection, except to myself and my spouse. She's okay with a controlled, contained, modest collection, as long as it doesn't overwhelm the house. Myself, I'm more interested in machines I enjoy using, not being as interested in a collection merely to look at. Some I do enjoy using, some I don't, and many are just so-so. I think it's like a bell-curve distribution in statistics. I've had a lot of machines that fall into that wide middle range of not being overtly terrible, but not exciting either. Do typewriters have to be exciting in order to be used? That's an interesting question.

For me, they shouldn't present some obvious distraction during their use, like operational issues (skipping, poor imprint, et cetera); nor should they be hard to use, with obvious ergonomic issues (crowded keyboard, hard touch, et cetera). Machines that fall into this category are on the low end of the bell curve distribution. I'll pass, thank you.

On the other end of the curve are machines with no obvious flaws, but also just "disappear" into the background when you begin to use them. They offer comfort, efficiency and, before you know it, a page or two has been written and you've suddenly discovered that you'd "zoned out" into the work itself, not overtly aware of the typewriter itself. Like when you become proficient at a manual transmission car, and can drive across town in city traffic and not even remember shifting, it just becomes muscle memory. That's how a good typewriter should be.

Not every typebar electric machine falls into this latter category. In spite of their ease of use, some are just a bit too irritating, like a pet who constantly has to be petted, needing attention. Your workhorse typer shouldn't need attention. But having a featherlight touch, rapid response and dark imprint independant of finger pressure goes a long way toward making typebar electrics that ideal workhorse writing tool.

Personally, I prefer standard 9-inch-wide carriages, and manual carriage return. The auto-return machines sling the carriage with considerable force, which tends to distract me momentarily with thoughts that it's going to break itself any minute, or jump off the table mid-return. Illogical, perhaps, but that's how my mind works. Not so illogical is the fact that there are extra complications to the auto-return mechanism, a clutch and secondary draw band system that performs the carriage return: more parts to break.

I like the rhythmic pattern of a momentary pause to return the carriage by hand, as I ponder what I've just written, or where the piece is headed. It feels natural to me, like the cycles of nature, the ebb and flow of the hand-thrown carriage, the reaper's scythe harvesting words.

Over the years I've seen a number of typebar electrics in secondhand thrift and antique stores, but very few met all the criteria for me to seriously consider; either they had wide carriages, auto-carriage return or some obscure, outdated cartridge ribbon system -- or they were totally thrashed to pieces. But there's also the fact that I haven't always looked at typebar electrics with an interested eye. But now I'm coming around to really appreciating them for what they potentially can offer the writer, in terms of speedy operation with excellent, featherlight ergonomics combined with a dark imprint, all for a typically low price, as manual typers seem to attract the attention of the high-bidders these days.

I'm not a Hermes snob, nor am I anti-Hermes, but it's fun to think about a machine costing one tenth of a Hermes 3000 that sports a softer touch and faster operation. The only hitch is the power cord, the need to plug 'er in. Unless you have one of those SCM Poweriters, but that's a story for another day.

There's also one feature of typebar electrics that I'm absolutely thrilled about, which is the apostrophe being lowercase and adjacent to the L, in the home row (instead of a shifted 8 in the upper row, in the case of most manual machines). This makes the writing of contractions a breeze, crucial to written dialog with its idioms of speech.

Stay well and keep creating!

Are Typewriters Alive?

This essay came alive to me in unexpected ways as I was sitting in front of the Hermes 3000 under the shade of the umbrella at my patio table, on a warm spring day. It started as a thought I had while I lay in bed several nights previous, which was that it seemed as if typewriters had the power to impart their own effect on the writing process, even to modulate the writer's voice. In a flight of fancy I asked myself if this might even be construed as a form of intelligence on the part of the machine, all the while simultaneously knowing they to be a complex assemblage of bits of metal parts, and that these thoughts were mere nonsense. Yet, following the chain of thought further, I asked myself if perhaps they possessed some primitive consciousness, in the way that people in the early 1970s began to think of plants as possessing a consciousness of their surroundings, as documented in Tompkins' and Bird's The Secret Life of Plants.

It's most likely the effect being observed with typewriters involves the process of how tools modulate the work of the artisan, yet it seemed sufficient to follow this fanciful thought further. If typewriters do possess a primitive form of consciousness -- or, like a virus that harnesses the reproductive process of living cells to procreate, the machines' harness the physical and emotional abilities of the writer -- do they do so individually, or is there some collective consciousness that might explain the slow but steady resurgence of interest in the typewriter? Are they reviving themselves, by harnessing the enthusiasm of writers and aficionados; or is their revival intrinsic and inevitable, a natural expectation in the evolution of human technology, with its ebb and flow in repetitive cycles?

All of this is mere fancy, and at most metaphoric of observations writers make about how they interact with their tools. These thoughts are a mental model and nothing more, that happen to explain some phenomena we observe as we create new work with these tools. Like most models, they are imperfect and subject to change. In the way that the Aether Theory served as a model for how space works, and even as it still seems to explain some observational phenomena today, we now know of better models; so too is the theory of living typewriters a mere mental construct, which we can choose to hold close or discard, depending on the breadth of our imagination.

Of course, ask any typewriter aficionado and they are certain to agree that, yes, some typewriters seem to be alive, seem to impart that something special into their creative process. I will leave it to you to decide if that constitutes some form of consciousness. I know where I stand.