Sometimes, a visitor to my home notices the mermaid-blue typewriter or the record player or the crowd of ink bottles and fountain pens on my desk.

From time to time, one of them asks why I have these things in a tone that suggests I may be keeping a zebra in the bathtub or a dirigible in the backyard. As in,

“Why on earth wouldn’t you use a laptop, stream music, and for heaven’s sake, use a regular pen – on the rare occasions when a pen is even necessary?”

I’ll tell you why.

I am unwilling to relinquish the sensual pleasures these things afford. For instance:

  • the fun of rolling a clean page onto the platen and then the clack clack clack as my fingers dance across the lightly-indented keys;
  • the delicate lifting of a record from its cardboard sleeve and holding it gingerly on the edges by two fingers before threading it onto the spindle and setting the needle carefully in the first groove;
  • and the delight of choosing the right color for the job, cleaning pens, drying them, refilling their converters, and enjoying the scritch-scratch of the nib over the paper.

These things are fun for me, and it seems important that they all involve the hands, the ears, and the eyes in a direct, pleasurable way.

They also all involve some form of mess or fuss.

I have created ink messes, occasionally with the help of Mish, my cat, that could rival any Jackson Pollack canvas. The inside of my right hand fourth finger is currently stained a purplish green. Keeping pens flowing requires care and effort and frequent trips to the sink. I heartily enjoy all of this.

The typewriter requires doctoring by a smart man one town over who loves doing it. He trained for his work with business machines back in the 1980’s and tells me he is the only one left who knows how to keep these things clacking. And at home, I frequently mistype and have to start over. I will say, though, that a poem often improves quite a bit between one messy type-draft and the next. Nothing is ever wasted.

The fuss of records is really just sleeves strewn about the table as I bounce from one artist to the next. I lose myself in reading the notes and lyrics printed on the backs and before I know it there’s a drift of cardboard sleeves. But then there’s the fun of clearing up and getting ready for the next visit with these grand songs.

Once in a while, someone cocks a snook at me in a way that suggests I’m stuck in the past. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

I have built four websites, one of them with a level of complexity that arouses envy on a fairly regular basis.

I was an early adopter of Zoom and have held a paid account since 2016 – well before the pandemic drove us all online.

I have set up multiple payment portals and uploaded videos and created automated systems.

The funny thing is, I’m pretty good at all this stuff. That comes as much of a surprise to me as to anyone.

Still, I like old ways and old tools, too. Just as I always choose “the pretty way” when I’m driving somewhere, if I have a choice, I always opt for the fun way, or the delightful way, or the interesting way. I’m not about to get rid of something good just because someone somewhere decried its inconvenience (before selling us an expensive replacement). Since when is convenience the most important thing?

In our increasingly virtual world, it seems everything is downloaded or streamed or paperless. This is sold to us as an improvement over the old “clunky” ways of doing things or being entertained.

I’m not so sure.

I prefer an embodied life, a life in the senses, a life of touching and smelling, cooking and dancing, writing and picnicking. Some clunky is OK with me. Some mess and fuss, too. (I was blessed to grow up in a fisherman’s house; for us, mess and stink were a sign that my father was making money).

Instead of convenient, what if we chose delicious, fun, or fascinating? What if we planted a flag for sensual, sensory experience?

I’m going to answer my own question here with something unprovable, controversial, and perhaps wrong, but it’s what I truly believe.

We’d all be happier. Much!