Underwood man confronts an algorithm

The Column: 05.30.25

The most infuriating website in the country is Amtrak’s and buying a one-way ticket from Manhattan to Old Saybrook the other day brought me to the verge of pulling out a pistol and blowing the laptop to pieces but I don’t own a pistol and there’s a decent novel in the hard drive, but I was seriously irked. But it’s good to be irked, good for the heart, good for the disposition. Calm is greatly overrated as an attitude. I’ve suffered from an excess of it for years.

The infuriation, of course, was my fault. I am a museum piece from back in the manual typewriter era, tapping on an Underwood, a handsome machine now found in antique stores and journalism schools in impoverished countries. I haven’t punched Underwood keys since I was in my twenties. I still like to take a good pen and a yellow legal pad and sit and write. I believe there’s a circuit between hand and eye that can produce sentences more elegant than the one I’m typing now on a laptop. But the laptop is my main instrument. I prefer it for its vast ability to Delete. Using the cursor I can gray out whole passages and poking the little red dot at the top of the file I could, if I wish, make thousands of words vanish from the world without a trace and never bothering anybody ever again. There’s something heroic about doing this. You can burn a paper manuscript but nobody ever does, they accumulate and turn yellowish and wind up in an archive.

Deletion is noble. Someday, if necessary, I wish to be deleted myself. There is a time to exit and if the body hangs on, then steps must be taken. I want my people to put me in a small room with a glass of Scotch, a pack of smokes, an audio of one of Mr. Trump’s three-hour campaign speeches, and a .38 pistol, and let that be the end of it.

The drawback of the laptop is its power to distract. A man is busy about the task of writing something sensible and useful and shining light into dark corners, and then succumbs to the temptation of sending Google into other dark corners, such as the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance and how much was Howard Hughes worth and did the Beatles sing on Ed Sullivan’s show or was it lip-synched and do Ukrainians consider themselves to be Russian and has anyone located the Ten Commandments and was Beowulf a real person and did Teddy Roosevelt kill any beasts on his African safaris or did he only pose with a rifle, and was J.D. Salinger happy after he vanished from public view, and is it true that Albert Einstein was unable to sail a small boat, and how soon as a rule do famous people become unknown.

Scripture says: “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” This is the Buddhist side of the Christian faith. On the other hand, Scripture says, “All things work together for good to them that love God,” which has not always been true in my case. Perhaps my aims are not high enough. In church on Sunday, we sang, “Lord, lift me up and help me stand by faith on heaven’s tableland,” and I am not sure what, at 82, I hope to be lifted up to, other than to be a happy old man. A cheerful old coot who’s grateful for longevity and not wishing for immortality. Mother got to 97 in good shape but she did gardening, vacuuming, mopping, and used a washboard and hung heavy laundry on clotheslines, a better workout than what you get with pen and paper.

We live in a golden age of American journalism. Heroic work is being done on all sides, graceful, honest writing, sometimes wildly funny. The times demand it. The sheer corruption, stupidity, and arrogance at the top demand journalists be soldiers and I see bravery everywhere I look. I don’t do that sort of journalism but I admire it. I am simply a passenger on the train, a spectator at the show. The show is summer, the American people afoot, taking the sun, families gathering, their decency and good humor apparent for all to see. This age era is passing, a new one is soon to arrive. This piggish president with his lavish contempt for people does not represent us and he will be stopped.

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