I type with two middle fingers

Scanning the keyboard with a kind of thousand-yard stare, my digits move quickly, but I’ve never mastered the ability to look at the screen and let every finger fly. Interesting mistakes are made.

Ideation

While in ideation mode, I need a pen and paper. Concurrently scribbling words, pictures and diagrams, moving instantly between the three, produces far more interesting outcomes than each can do by themselves. Twenty-six characters aren’t enough. Somewhere in the mix, while moving between each of the mediums, a language reveals itself. Once revealed, I type with two middle fingers, always searching the alphabet for a letter that doesn’t exist.

Never erasing ideas

Ink on paper is permanent. Confidence is required and, also perhaps, the ability to ignore mistakes and wholesale failure. Connecting the dots, while trying to create new dots , can get messy. Sometimes literally. Often figuratively. Almost always metaphorically. As Miles Davis once said, “There are no wrong notes in jazz, only notes in the wrong places.”

Scribbles confuse

The idea of developing an idea must be emphasized. I don’t write prose by hand, I use a laptop. That said, when the creative exercise described above satisfies and appears half-birthed enough to discuss, and I share it with friend or colleague, the looks can be quizzical until I distill the idea into only words. Only words.

An open mind

As I write this essay, using two middle fingers and twenty-six characters, I know that the idea will be easy to understand and easier to dismiss. Too, it will have been easy to type and transmit. Perhaps it will connect with you, wherever you are, across the globe, all because of the greased skids of the Wi-Fi that carries the message without the permanence of ink on paper.

I’ll publish this essay’s scribbles and soul in a future post.

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