Thursday, April 11, 2013

Balls

a short story about something to play with if you can't sleep



INSOMNIA
Its a word not a sentence they say, but to Jane it was a sentence, a complete sentence, a life sentence. 
It came any time  that a weariness flooded over her and demanded she recline.  The very second she succumb and laid her head to rest, her mind would become a shattered mirror of recollections. Shards of thoughts , glinting images, ideas, solutions, problems flashed behind her closed eyes.  Her body would drench itself in a hot sweat of anxiety and cold shivers of fear. 
This was not normal for a normal person.  
But Jane was a normal person, as normal as anyone she knew, she fitted into society, had friends. 

The red leather sofa was reclined again tonight, the TV showing a drama repeat with the sound muted.  A smart side-table light stained the room with a dullness that softened edges and blurred the colours she had so carefully chosen.  The sofa had turned out to be Jane’s workbench.  It was intended as a place of comfort, of composure, a place she could fall to when there was a hope she may slip away without her brain ambushing her.   She saw the sofa though as her workbench for the simple reason she so often ended up working here. It was where she would be most nights, pecking at the laptop, prodding at an i-screen, social surfing, emailing, looking at stuff.  Sleep again, as usual, had once more failed to claim her mind.  Jane was considering her 2 bedrooms a complete waste of space.
As it turned out, this night was to be a night of inspiration as she had decided to use her keyboard to bore herself to sleep.  Just to keep writing stuff brainlessly on a blank word doc until her fingers paused, her eyes drooped and the screen dimmed.  It was a plan. She started …
“ It used to be the pounding at letter buttons, smashing inked keys into paper, now we are still clicking letter buttons and pushing digits around a screen, same old thing though, same way of data capture for, what, nearly two centuries?  Yeah, Wikywords says 1819 was the first practical    typewriter.  Wonder when keyboards standardised as qwerty keyboard.  This was done because typewriters used to have levers throwing type keys at paper.  Qwerty key order came about so that frequently used key levers didn’t jam as they swung past each other.  At least that is what I understand as the reason.  There was another theory, one that said some blokes changed the order to slow down female typers who were more proficient than the men. I don’t know about that, is typers a word?  Should be.  Typist sounds such a female term , or is that just me?



 I remember, later on, maybe in the 1970’s there were sort of golf ball type-heads, but they still got thrown against paper.  A carbon ribbon flew up and down between the paper and the type head.  The ribbon was textile, later a plastic film.  Copies were made by carbon paper being put between pages, the copies at the back got fuzzy.  Photocopiers didn’t happen till the late 70’s IBM had a thing called a CopierII . It was massive and used huge rolls of heat sensitive paper.  There was lots of paper.  Typewriter paper came in different thinness’s so more copies could be made.  Is that the right use for an apostrophe in thinness’s?  Spell-check, what a marvellous thing.  And thin carbon paper was more expensive.  Any errors were made in duplicate, triplicate and more.  Corrections were re-typed or pages thrown away, some machines had sticky tape so a backspace and retype would pull the plastic film letters off, didn’t fix the carbon copies though.  I can’t recall when   the carbon     paper     got         replaced by   pressure sensitive           duplicating paper but        the          back pages        still      got      blurry           an 

Hey that’s good.  Dozed off, clock says only for minutes though.  Where was I?  Oh yeah.  That’s all I’ve got about keyboards, but here I am still using one. Although predictive text, that’s nice.  As is punctuation correct, capital letter after a full stop, I rely on that.  Ive tried,   oh look it doesn’t recognise Ive for an apostrophe but it does for doesn’t . I’ve. Ive.  No it doesn’t learn … Voice recognition does learn, that’s getting so much better too, I use voice recognition a lot now, texting, I even use it to draft notes.  It is getting so good pretty soon we will be able to use it for most writing and form filling. That will be nice.  Then we could talk our texts, letters and emails into existence.  If the person receiving them had the same voice recognition thing they could hear them read out.  Maybe we could have a program that mimicked our voice tone.  It would be like text-talking to each other, or at each other.  But texting voice to voice would be like a machine solution that would allow us to have something I will call textversation  where we speak into a machine and almost immediately, or even immediately, the person could similarly reply.  I’d call it textiphone, or voicelink  or something like telephonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn 

Oh, another nap. Twenty minutes that time.  I’m getting to think this may just catch on.  I wonder if anyone else goes to sleep while keyboarding.   I really hope voice to text to voice doesn’t,  ooh,  look that was  another auto apostrophe,  Ive, nope still hasn’t  learned, but it does know hasn’t has an apostrophe.  I must think of more apostrophised words…. Later though.  I wonder if touch screen and skype could be developed so you could feel the person you are talking to.  Oh my god, imagine porn sights then.  Have to develop some pretty impressive waterproofed touch-screen tech though.  Wet-wipe tolerant.  I would call it datafeel , or  smutversation.  No hang on, this isn’t working.  My brain’s going all mirror-shatter again.  I’m seeing talking appendages and orifices with dialogue pulsing under my handprint, hot skin throbbing to my touch                                     .”
Jane stopped writing and went to her bed, she had things to do there now and bed was the best place for it.

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