Preface To Paper: Paperless

This is being written on a computer.  My fingers are tapping a keyboard.  I'm doing it in my head, I wrote nothing down before, I am thinking thoughts & typing them out.  (I expect I'll make mistakes but I can just delete them & start again.)  This is just to say that at no point in this process was paper used - not for rough drafts, not for doodling, not for anything.

Which is both sad & a little weird, because I always had paper around when I was a kid.  I loved to draw & of course in school I took notes on paper.  I didn't have a word processor or a typewriter in college so most of my papers I wrote were by hand.  (I kind of lost my ability to write cursive for that reason: my cursive became about as comprehensible as shorthand, so when I wrote essays & stuff I simply wrote the opposite of cursive, which I just now read is called "printing."  I need to qualify that because "printing" means something different when it comes to word processing.)

One of my favorite times of year when I was in school was the very last day, when people would throw their spiral notebooks into the air in glee & the hallways would be littered with half-empty notebooks & folders & scrap paper of all kinds.  I collected them & I filled them up - with diary entries, lists, drawings, etc.  I still have many of those notebooks, actually - I threw away a lot of them when we moved from Texas, but I saved lots.

& now I remember I used to write lots of letters.  By hand.  On paper.

But for the most part, since around 1995, everything I've written - like on this blog - has been electrons on a computer screen.  I have tried to save my old email - but they're in computer files, not printed out.  It's crazy & strange.

Because by all rights I should have boxes & boxes of decades of writing.  But nope.  About half my life ago, there was a fundamental shift in how humans kept records, wrote mail, even illustrated.  The only paper I have around me now is in a printer.

What do I write anymore?  I think just grocery lists.  But check this: I make a grocery list on scrap paper, then I type it into the computer & print it out.  It's neater.  It's better organized.  & I can actually read it.

Yeah, I guess I miss paper being such a central part of my life.  I do sometimes go to the stationary section of stores & daydream about buying a binder or one of those black & white composition books.  But it would never be filled up.  It would be better bought by someone who would use it.

That's not me, not anymore.