THE DARK HORSE OF THE FINE LINE
On the Type-Written Page
Everyone has a process.
Mine starts at a typewriter.
Here’s the story,
When other kids were finding the Apple home computer on their desks and that printer that spit out those connected pages with tearaway sides next to a set of encyclopedias, I still clicked away to the noise of metal striking paper.
As a bonus, I had notoriously illegible handwriting since day number one, even by the low bar set of standards made by the most patient and understanding Kindergarten teacher with a felt dog puppet on her hand. I learned early that some things, no matter how much you want them to, can’t be fixed with a graham cracker, positive encouragement, and a nap. I’m also left-handed, which will gear one up for a constant ink smudge of cheap blue ballpoint on the spiral notebook page while facing the high-pressure clock tick of the eleventh-grade English in-class report. Making my literary concept a near work of a modern art master by the time the bell rang. Cy Twombly would have been proud and probably encouraged me to keep going if he had run in my circles, but sadly, he was busy doing other things.
So, throughout my education, I instead chose to look out the window of all my classrooms at the world beyond the confines; as a consequence, I spent many years switching schools and locked up in summer school every year after fifth grade with the faculty’s B-team, trying to undo the damage from the school year like some academic Papillion. I narrowly made it through the pre-college era while proving that I could, in fact, graduate on time while gradually developing the saving grace of being able to type quickly without looking down at the keyboard, another skill that had separated me from the pack—the first skill after some acting which would put a check in the pocket for writing coverage for various mostly marginal production companies during the second half of my teen era.
And then, one day, many years later, with all traditional authoritarians long gone, I realized I didn’t like White Out.
While it made Mike Nesmith’s single working mother a millionaire, which was cool for her and him, it wasn’t working for me: the brush and the process of fixing a mistake, waiting for it to dry, and then resetting the margin is and was my mind’s ultimate thought killer—the enemy.
Realizing that I had been living with the apparition of a shitty summer school teacher in my head all these years, ready to slash an F across the page, I decided to finally fire that moonlighting sonofabitch and that organizational concept of waiting for the sentence before I moved on it. No more would I work through my early drafts as if I were going to be graded on the placement of my commas. I would move forward with a stream of consciousness while employing my suspect penmanship as I went along. Writing by hand had been dormant since leaving college except when paying bills or sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. And while my handwriting has not improved, I could still quite easily decode it upon reexamination.
The White Out was gone.
The process felt better despite the spelling mistakes that came with firing through it all fast and the Q key that never hits right on the brown electric Coronet. But, like in life, my gears move through fragments, eventually bringing the narrative as I sift through the beautiful chaos, the boring, the poetic, and the excess fat.
Ultimately, I find it.
Rough drafts & fragments on paper by Nick Ebeling
References to artist Cy Twombly, musician/producer Michael Nesmith & White Out heiress Bette Nesmith Graham. If any of these people sound unfamiliar, look at one or all of them. You’ll be happy you did.
REST IN PEACE - Genius wordsmith and lyricist DAMO SUZUKI
Left-handed people rule!