081018 Well. Here we are. Which keyboard do we want to use? Which text editor do we want to use? I like my WASD but I wish I’d gotten the clears or the browns instead of the blues. It’s not that I mind the click; it’s just that the click is too high pitched. It sounds like the sound in the back of your neck when you’re neck deep in the creek and someone starts grinding their feet into the pebbles on the bottom. Again, not a *bad* thing *per se,* but just a little, oh I don’t know, irritating when repeated hundreds, thousands, millions of times a day in rapid succession. OK, that’s out of the way. I would buy a new WASD, but I would feel too dumb buying one of the same layout with different switches, and I would rationalize it by getting the compact size (closer to the trackpad, don’t ya know; more moveable on the desk like the Apple one only a real keyboard, etc etc)—but those don’t have arrow keys. You have to use FN to get arrows and delete. Which maybe wouldn’t be so bad, but as someone pointed out, when you have to combine that with keystrokes that already use a lot of modifiers (like moving and selecting a word at a time, for example) it seems as though it could get pretty cumbersome. Still pretty tempting. They say the case is metal. *Metal....* Remember how much I wanted the Smith Corona with the oval keys? How I would go to the office supply store and just gaze at it, listen to it, type on it (which you can’t even do with a WASD!), and finally drift on to the other aisles; the pencils, the boston clips, the bulldog clips, the *Le Pens,* the T-squares and templates, the tacks, the paper, the junior legal pads.... The only thing that saved me then was that I couldn’t just drop a wad and buy that stupid thing. The problem is that now I can if I want to. And I always want to. And disillusionment is inevitable, which means you would think I would learn. But I don’t. Why not? Why is this a thing that I’ve repeated over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over since leaving home and getting a credit card? It’s the bright shiny thing that Isherwood in his Buddhism/meditation phase was talking about, isn’t it? Each thing is like the next mini golf hole. You pay your money, you play your eighteen holes, and then it’s over. Maybe you wish you could go back and explore a little bit. Leave the confines of the greens. Relax and feel the breeze and laugh with your kids instead of grimly teaching them how to hold the golf club. You know—actually *play.* The thing that doesn’t cost money and therefore isn’t real. The thing you don’t get any return on your investment for. Every time you go out, you want to spend some money, because spending money is the only thing that makes you feel like you exist. Money, the exchange of money, is how we humans in this society or whatever you want to call it have agreed to persuade ourselves that our “actions” are physical. Have agreed to persuade ourselves that our codes, our documents and spreadsheets (note the skeuomorphism even in the names of these conceptual attractors) somehow have some connection with something *real.* Either everything is real or nothing is. I’m leaning towards the latter. Every time you spend money, you’re shoring up the flood wall against the vast emptiness. What if you didn’t? What if you just bought food when you needed to eat and feed your kids? What if it was as simple as you could get it? What if What if Or you could get a new keyboard instead. I’m sure feeling the weight of that metal case against the sturdy surface of the desk would make you a better writer. You would have your coffee and your writing and your desk and your curtain and the morning sun, and somebody would be along shortly to take a picture of you, and then you would get famous and then you wouldn’t be lonely any more, because the fame would make your graying hair look dignified, and your weak chin look like a square jaw, your basket of neuroses look like creativity, and your weird collection of aging smells smell like animal magnetism, and so moderately mature younger-middle-aged women and men would flock to you—hell, even young men and women would gather around your feet, but you’re so supple and sagacious that you would smile on them instead of taking advantage of them, and that would make the ones just a little closer to your own age even more enamored of you, and they would cleave to you and fight for you and do your dishes and invite you on adventures that there’s no way anyone could possibly ever have just by paying for them, no, because these are genuine adventures, not the kind you pay for you stupid tourists, but you’re not stupid because everyone has something of value to offer and I actually get that, you know, I’m not superior and judgmental, because I understand all about how people are and what things mean and what’s real and what’s not—strictly because of the solid, subtle clacking of my metal-based, compact, mechanical, Cherry-MX-clear-with-O-ring-dampeners mechanical keyboard. So yeah. I should definitely buy the keyboard. Right now. It’s obviously the only way to really live.