Communication Breakdown

I made a pretty, ochre-colored splotch on the carpet in my office when I melted down today.

I was in mid-groove this afternoon as I slid out of my shirt and tie and eased into a battle-scarred pair of jeans and big, floppy sweatshirt, and then saddled up to my computer desk.

Everything was fine here at the Kughen Home for the Mentally Deranged and Criminally Insane...that is until I logged in and pulled down my email. Now, it is not unusual for me to receive in excess of 100 email messages a day during the week. I accept this as part of the obligatory ball and chain that goes with being a modern Internet user at home and at work.

But today, as I watched the happy little parade of email roll into my equally happy PC, I began to shudder. With hands trembling and my butt sinking deeply into my high-back chair, I rested my face on the keyboard and wondered just what had happened to my once serene, non-technical existence. As I drifted into a fitful sleep, face-down at my computer, I dreamt of those carefree days when I actually talked to folks on the telephone, occasionally visited in person and almost never got more than a few emails a week. Those were happy days.

With a snort, I flopped over into a bale of computer cables beside my desk and ebbed farther away into a deep sleep. Then, I dreamt of running through a flowery field in the sunshine, the birds singing and chirping in the distance as a fair maiden's lithe voice drifted o'er my head. But as I ran through that utopic field, chasing maidens (all of whom, incidentally, were my wife) and butterflies, I began to notice the world around me begin to change. The change was subtle at first, but it grew more overt with each passing second.

The sun slipped behind menacing clouds, and flowers wilted and dropped their pedals into the yellowing grass. The skies opened and a black rain began to hose this once beautiful field. And as I lay there, cowering in the crab grass, I heard the rodent-like scurries of an army of little feet tramping my way.

That's when I saw them.

There were thousands of sickly grimacing little email notes that had sprouted knobby legs and were wielding pitch forks and hot pokers. They scampered my way, whining and chortling, and in general seeming as though they were up to no good.

I know trouble when I see it, so I stumbled to my feet and ran like the wind, the rain biting my face and the sick, dead grass squishing between my toes. I ran and ran and ran.

They ran faster.

And then I heard their battle cries. They screamed like berserkers as they bailed from miniature airplanes that darted overhead. The sky grew dark as millions of miniature emails blotted out the sun and drifted into the dead grass around me.

Panting like a dog, I stumbled once, twice, then careened into the grass landing on my schnoz with a dull thwack. I lay there for a few seconds with blades of grass stuck to my tongue - eyes hazy and wild - too tired to give additional flight.

They then surrounded me, shouting something about Custer and Little Big Horn, but by then I was curled into a ball, shielding my ashen face from their tiny little hot pokers. I saw one of them wing by my head with what appeared to be a rather large meat fork.

I opened my mouth to scream, but was silenced as they rushed to me, their tiny feet digging into my soft, lily white beer belly and as I tried to bellow again, my mouth was filled with thousands of them and...

With a clatter, I careened away from my desk, knocking over a pile of blank CDs and launching my wireless mouse across the room. Spitting mouthfuls of paper out, I realized that I had swallowed a sizeable portion of a notebook on my desk.

Shaking the sick mass of paper that had formed a spitball the size of a small dog on my tongue, I glanced at my computer screen to see that my in inbox of unsorted mail had grown to more than 1,600 individual pieces of mail in just the past month.

Kicking aside the CDs that had been dashed to the floor, I settled back into my chair and saw that some 100 or so email messages had invaded my machine just today and were now marauding about my inbox. I thought I heard one or two of them snicker, but I wasn't sure.

So after my meltdown, I settled back into a posture that all to familiar these days: me hunched over the keyboard, illuminated by the flicker of a computer monitor, hunting and pecking at breakneck speed, answering the daily typhoon of email.

Sometimes I wonder just why it is necessary for any human to communicate that much. I try to remember a simpler time when folks had to use a crude device known as a telephone to talk to folks who weren't standing in front of them.

I vaguely remember telephones. I believe they're those funky looking things with buttons antennas. If you're not sure, walk over to it, shake the dust bunnies away and lift it off the charger and place it to your ear. You should hear an irritating hum. That's a telephone.

Now if we could just remember how to use the damn things.

The Mustached Lady and the Kid

She was big and ugly.

My third grade teacher used to stand over me with pursed lips and her dark female mustache quivering as her face twisted into a phantasmagoric sneer. She would rap my desk with one of her hairy-knuckled, knobby fingers while showing me the finer points of penmanship.

She was the pure embodiment of all that was wholly frightening to an 8-year-old boy. This was in the days when children watched scary movies, read scary comics and weren’t sheltered from everything slightly that side of wholesome. That meant I had seen my share of bugbears and bogeymen and I was absolutely sure that at that moment, I was staring at pure evil.

Nevertheless, my fellow third grade runts and I spent those long afternoons bent over our desks, tongues jutting from our mouths, gripping our No. 2 pencils with a fury better suited to slaying dragons than to toughing out the alphabet.

I was the class idiot who thought it wise to ask one day why we were spending so much time on our penmanship when all the adults I knew wrote just slightly better than Cro-Magnon man did when all he had for ink was some squashed up bat shit and a gob of saliva, and used a big rock for a tablet. That's not to mention that he used his finger as a pen.

I spent a lot of time that year staring at the corner of the room - my very own Purgatory, as it were - while she continued to enslave her remaining minions, making them fit those damn letters between the lines on page after page of Goldenrod paper until several students had to be carried off to the art room and force-fed some paste before they snapped back to reality.

Evil, that woman.

Life through my early teens was pretty much normal in the penmanship department until I was introduced to my first typewriter. It was a big, old manual-style typewriter that was missing a key or two, giving it sort of a leering, toothless grin. I learned to type on that monster. You had to step back 20 or 30 yards, get a good running start and leap on it with both hands to get it to peck at the paper, but it produced documents somewhat neater than my ransom note-style of writing could ever hope to turn out.

Then, in college, along came the computer...your friend and mine (yes, I had friends who had TRS computers back in the eighties, but they were also the kids who spent their school years getting stuffed into lockers and being given “swirlies” in the john - and wasn’t about to be one of them).

The computer allowed us to type reams and reams of worthless drivel, make and easily correct mistakes, use fancy fonts and put pictures of our dogs into our term papers. For us writers, it became our virtual notepad, our endless canvas where we could feel free to make obscene verb choices and to let our participles dangle. We could even feel free to be obtuse - or as Les Nessman would say, “rounded at the free end” - with correct type only as far away as the backspace key.

This computer fad – as some of the blue hairs called it then – never faded away. In fact, most of us wouldn’t dream of sitting down to write an actual letter to save our very lives. We’ll happily sit down and pound out a windy email on most any topic, but actually grasp a pen and put to paper, c’mon!

Recently, I have realized, with a certain amount of horror, that I have nearly forgotten how to write with a standard pencil and paper. While in the checkout line at the supermarket, I sometimes actually struggle to write a check. Signing a simple Christmas or birthday card is a chore and writing a grocery list is just pure torture. I am so used to being able to back up, revise my thought, correct mistakes and then move on only when it’s perfect, the act of actually writing by hand is frightening.

In fact, this past holiday season while trying to handwrite a note in a Christmas card, I suddenly found myself nearly chewing my tongue off while trying to scratch out a simple note. If I had been under any more pressure, I'm afraid I would have had a third grade flashback and begun winging spitballs and making gross noises with my armpit. When you’re only writing maybe 20 words, it’s pretty bad when you make three mistakes that need to be scratched out. Where’s the backspace key when you need it?

Being of the writer ilk, I used to take my tattered journal out to a riverbank, toss a line in and sit pouring my soul into my little book while nature did the natural thing around me. Now, I'd strongly consider lugging along my Dell and a cigarette lighter power adapter attachment to sit in my truck near a river and surf Facebook or YouTube. I still have all the same “writerly” thoughts I had way back when. It’s just that my medium for getting them from the scary recesses of my head to the paper is totally electronic now.

In fact, I find it hard to actually even be creative any longer with a pen and paper. I get the ideas, sure, but they don’t flow out unless I am behind a keyboard, squinting at my screen and drumming my feet on the floor under my desk.

I sometimes wonder now whatever became of that evil woman. I could go on about the ways in which she is permanently ensconced in my childhood memories, but that’s not the point (at least not for this column). If I had to guess, I would say most likely she was summoned back to whatever fiery pit from which she originally sprang forth. That is, after she tortured another generation or two of kids who feel into her clutches after I moved on.

My whole point here is that despite her pure evil nature, that third grade teacher might actually have had a point. While not as important as it used to be – at least for many professional pursuits these days – penmanship does still have a place. I guess she actually she taught me something on those long spring days when a young boy's fancy turns to kickball and to laying claim to the top rung on the monkey bars.

Good penmanship is an art and that no matter how far we go with this whole technology thing, we're still going to have to scratch our names every now and then, so it pays to not totally eschew the lowly pen and paper.

The again, I could just get a tablet PC…