Folks, I pride myself on being ‘a doer’.
I get shit done. Sometimes I get shit on, shit gets real or I get the shits. But, generally, if you need, or want, something done:
I might dither a bit, complain a lot, but it’ll get done.
Which is why I get a bit anxious about having missed some of my personal Substack deadlines lately. And it’s not like I don’t have anything to say (hey, getting me to shut up is the real trick!)
I, we, have been a bit, busy. Tired even.
It’s an old complaint: when I have the time, I don’t have the energy and when I have the energy, I don’t have the time.
Life. What can you do?
So, in the past few weeks, after missing a couple of self-imposed deadlines, I’ve been thinking:
‘Why do I write on ‘the Stack’?’
Honestly, what screaming need is inside me to do this?
Well, the answer turned up on the weekend when Doll and I were reminiscing about learning to type on manual typewriters back in the day.
The smell of ink, the dinging bell, the ratchet of the paper roll, the jamming of the keys, all those things are lost now:
I learned to type at the age of fourteen when my English teacher said I would either learn to type or she would stop marking my essays (apparently, she needed a microscope to read my handwriting).
My mate Errol joined me. Not just because he was a good mate (he actually was, and still is, happily), but because he was a left-hander and his writing was illegible as it was smudgy.
So, we were dragged to the typing room by our frazzled English teacher where we discovered two things, we were the only boys in the class and the teacher, the amazing, lovely and very enthusiastic Miss Clements, made us feel so welcome we fell in love with her in the doorway.
Under her guiding hand, and cloud of wonderful smelling perfume, we learned to type, repair typewriters and got to chat with our fellow female students, some of whom normally wouldn’t have been seen dead talking with the likes of us in public.
We were so rapt, we never missed a class. Several times, both of us dragged ourselves into school with illnesses we probably should have been hospitalised with, in order to attend typing lessons.
We not only learned to type, but also learned other useful stuff too i.e.: how to put together resume’s, job applications, business letters or kill an hour or so tapping out a picture:
I guess we had a much higher threshold for boredom back in the day?
We must have, because I nearly peed myself with delight when my parents gave me a portable Olivetti typewriter for my fourteenth birthday (and a set of cricket pads, such riches!)
That little typewriter went everywhere with me, for years.
For some reason, career advisors (aka: my parents and teachers) looked at me tapping away like a demented chimp, often long into the night, and thought, ‘Yeah, he’s a born fitter and turner!’
Not one person suggested I become a journalist, reporter, essayist, writer, or anything to do with working with words or the creative arts.
So, it was off t’ mill for me to learn how to work with metal and get hernias.
And that turned out OK I guess:
But knowing how to type, accurately, at sixty words per minute, and a lot more when I got a computer keyboard, and knowing how to string the right words together, quickly, really came in handy in the trade, and even got me promoted several times.
I eventually sold the typewriter when I got my third PC. I hadn’t used it for years. My cousin had a typewriter shop in Brisbane back in the 90’s (before it went the way of video rental stores) and he gave it a good service, but after writing one letter on it, I put the cover back on and slid it under my bed.
Farewell faithful friend.
My mother still has hers and, every now and then, her great grandchildren will play around with the ‘olden days computer’.
Finally, and here’s the whole point of this post, once I learned to type, I started writing long letters to family and friends.
Those letters were full of jokes, thoughts, ideas and things that had happened to me that week/fortnight. Often, I’d include photo prints from my little Kodak camera (a gift for my fifteenth Christmas, yeah, I know, I was in hog heaven!)
By all accounts, my weekly/fortnightly missives were very much looked forward to. As much as I looked forward to the replies mailed back.
Again, I think everyone had a much higher threshold for boredom (and, clearly, much more time to kill) back then.
Part of me, granted, a small part, wishes I could find one of those old letters, it’d be a hoot to see what sort of a teenaged mess I really was.
Anyhoo, let’s wrap this up.
I morphed from writing letters on a typewriter, to a PC using a dot matrix printer, then writing online email letters, sometimes attaching a grainy, but massive, 20kb photo to them!
Oh, the wondrous technology I had at my fingertips!
Then came social media and my email letters transformed into me posting crap, sorry, lovingly crafted letters, online or in blogs.
Plus, for a decade I wrote a weekly column for the local paper, which was loved far and wide by, I dunno, tens of people.
I didn’t know it then, or even until just recently, but I’ve always found a way to keep communicating with ‘my people’ using the written word.
So, if you’re reading this, well, Welcome to Gregs’ Online Chain Letter!
Minus the carbon copy paper, White Out, ink stains and bulging at the seams envelopes.
Oddly, I kind of miss licking the stamps, plus:
Yep, still got that high boredom threshold.
Cheers,
Greg