I'd call it a privilege if that word wasn't so exhausted. Of course, that doesn't mean you're guaranteed to get a hearing—a decent one, anyway. Not in this or any other domain, I should think. Nonetheless, no more moiling about at 2:30 a.m., riffling through unkempt papers and sundry scraps of miscellaneous half-thoughts and orphaned preludes; slicing your finger-ends in the hurried name of finding one last envelope in which to stuff your most recent insomnious musing. In truth, there is no more paper in sight... not even a desktop. Just a window in my hands on which to tap and swipe.
But still battling those grotesque postures. Hunched - maybe on your side, on the bed, over the counter, maybe outdoors - if you can still make out the typeface. Scrolling on. Narrating one’s decent in real time. I mean, does anyone really sit down at a desk to write on their handheld device, bludgeoning the touchscreen in such autoironic1 fashions as these? Neck's bad enough already, aside from looking bloody foolish. Nope. It's 'screen time' now. All of which is not made equal, I might add. A genesis of recumbent writers, still scrabbling all about, trying to get heard.
I think about going back to pad and pencil sometimes... Dysgraphia aside, it's not like I was there for long. Put the bloody dog out, would ya? Trying to do some writing here. Re-crane and ask: do you suppose you'll leave your password and screen PIN written down somewhere on that thing once known as parchment so your future biographer can crack into your oh-so-gripping online archive? Safely cloistered - or festering, as the case may be - in some unfathomable cloud. Some trove just begging to give up its contents... or maybe some priceless, previously unknown context. Or perhaps an accompanying diary, as in Steinbeck's diary of Wrath.
Ah, to be a floating head! Don't you agree that it'd be so nice to shed your cackling, writerly spine, if only for a day? Hey, do you think we could get one of those flotation tanks in here? Notwithstanding some ridiculous transhumanist daydream, how would one go about keeping hold of the damn device? Maybe just on breaks. Yes. Floating away—spinelessly.
I don't know. It just comes out! You know, the manufacturers could really do me a favour and expedite the formatting on these things: you gotta tap there, tap there, tap there again... Just to italicise! Then you’ve to repeat the process just to turn it off, of course. Interface shenanigans—peeves of the modern scribe. Still, italicising even thusly is a modern luxury—I know that much. They say, "Look up once in a while," somewhere in the mid-distance, I assume, "save your eyes." Save the piercing shards of yellow-blue light darting through my retinas—some twisted manifestation of migraines, or whatever... Cut, copy, paste, select all, 'web search', define, translate, find and replace the neuroses.
But a great thing, such self-publishing platforms as these. We're not completely censored here—not quite yet. Maybe I should include something herein that's a little more contrived or controversial, just to test the limits of suppression. Tempting... if only in the name of brinkmanship.
Misadventure... What? It's just a word I saw and wanted to use. Don't you ever feel that way? I hope it isn't, though. Free of typewriters and carbon paper, the goal, I'm sure, is still to be heard. Read. But instead of clandestine papers spreading like ripples on a pond behind the Iron Curtain, hope resides in one's seemingly necessary prostitutional adventures on X, Notes, and a crash of various other platforms, linked, just to forge some kind of readership—with the consequences for 'wrongful' dissemination being far more lenient (in most Western quarters). Jesus—what should the penalty be for leaving the bathroom floor this wet?
Mentions, likes, posts... Pages, sections, restacks... Discoverability options! My god, what is this hollow language? You know, you have a friend in the thesaurus. No. Of course it isn't cheating. One still has the chance to excel at the great skill of choosing. An exercise in aesthetic discrimination, if ever there was one. But we're not there yet, where I reside - probably closer than you'd think - but not quite. There still exist lingering opportunities for putting out prose on bones—thanks to sites like these. How long did that girl get sent down for?
Hmm, yes, quite...
Autoironic
/ˌɔːtəʊ-aɪˈrɒnɪk/
adj.
Definition:
Marked by a state of self-awareness so acute that it short-circuits sincerity.
Aesthetic or communicative mode in which irony is not applied to others or the world, but to oneself—habitually, compulsively, often as defense, sometimes as style.