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38. At Home in the Shack, a Winter Night, a Computer Write
In Hokkaido, northern Japan, December is arctic. Snow up to your crotch and at night a biting minus 2 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 19 C).
Back in the shack, after a sukiyaki supper - beef slices stew with various vegetables boiled in white rice - Ryo is in kitchen doing dishes by the red glowing coal stove.
In inner room Eddie sits typing at a low table, on ledge of the kotatsu; his legs dangling comfortably over the red hot charcoal’s glow in the square pit below. A geometric-design red tablecloth made by Ryo extends from the edges of the table and it covers his waist to keep in the warmth.
Later, Ryo sits at kitchen table, knitting a thick colorful wool blanket for their bed while Eddie types more. Eddie is beginning to realize that the Maniac computer in the camp security building has a word-processing program that has implications for anyone who writes. It can copy and paste blocks of print and move them around in text. It can delete and replace. It does rewrite and edit - giving a writer the ability to proof & correct, and to rewrite, update and edit much faster than the old white-out on typewriter. He can't bring Maniac home to the shack so he does the first draft into the typewriter's memory at home. Once he gets back to his office, he plugs the typewriter into Maniac and edits.
Eddie comes to realize the system allows one to produce literate writing without oneself having the inherited or difficultly learned talent for it. It reminds him of the monkey at typewriter analogy he'd heard at Professor Edwardes' Seminar. A reasonably educated person with imagination should be capable of writing readable stuff. The problem had been that unless one had a born or learned writer's talent to edit ahead in one's brain, it would take a lifetime to edit the raw writing into an acceptable-for-reading text. Now, with the computer, it goes so quickly, it's a neophyte novelist's wish fulfillment. In his mind, Eddie exclaims: A new, new age! He starts typing a story:
39. The Idiots
In a time that shall be dateless, in a town that shall be nameless dwelt a boy different from the other boys, not interested in their usual local interests but interested in the surrounding forest - the animals, the plants, the sun, the moon, the stars. So townspeople called him "the idiot."
Left to himself he explored the forest and often was away for days at a time. He learned from the animals - survival, sex and renewal, living life from needs not desires. He saw there is no moral right or wrong - there is just living. But he was aware that: as a human, a special animal, he was different, he had an expanded consciousness.
He ate plants and fished and found he could live leanly without manufactured food. He dressed lightly; it was a moderate clime - all he needed was tattered pants. His bare feet developed protecting callus. He learned that the body heals but he did not become fanatic like a Christian Scientist, he preferred a real scientist - the doctor in town.
At intervals he would come back to the town and stay at the doctor's house. The doctor had never married and the lonely old man loved when the boy came.
Also in the town was a girl, the youngest of 3 sisters. She was a strange girl. She sat at window watching the travelers on the open road into and out of town. She thought strange thoughts of far away things, She watched the animals who came early in morning out of nearby forest and she cared nothing about what the townspeople cared. She had a natural youthful beauty shining out from her mind; her sisters hated her for it. She too relied on the old doctor who visited sometimes.
Eddie stops typing. Ryo is already sleeping, her breaths come regularly; the room is dark except for his lamplight and the charcoal glow from the kotatsu below. He looks at his short story and thinks It's a bare bones; needs to be fleshed out with dialog, action, character development. And he realizes the advantage that the computer's word processing could make for writing a short story or novel. In old days, you'd have to do this in long hand or type it and then scribble corrections on the type sheet and type again. Here, now, he has a core of a story and can keep it intact in the machine's memory. Then, tomorrow at camp he can connect it to Maniac and insert it for fleshing out. He can do overnight what for lack of the computer would take a month, and usually would be abandoned before completing because he would have lost interest or energy.
A new, new age! he thinks as he gets into bed next to Ryo and lifts her nightgown to access her cleavage for a nice rear entry, some good sex and then sleep.
To return to Bronx. Click 14.40 Back in the Bronx - A Wedding
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