Familiarity Breeds Contentment

A Writer's Tool

Let me just start this off by saying I’m sorry for my unannounced ghosting of you over the past two weeks. I realize I took an unannounced two week hiatus and I did so without so much as a “by your leave”. The reason for my long absence was unintentional at best and careless at worst. There were good reasons for my absence and let me enumerate them to you as a balm to temper any possible flare-up caused by my rudeness. First off, my wife is pregnant and pregnancy hits her hard. More importantly to my point, and annoyingly overall, as our family is going through this period of jubilant, though difficult, transition during the cold winter months, I inadvisably brought the kids’ toddler basketball hoop, which is a mandatory prerequisite for being allowed to take your first kid home from the hospital, which goes to explain why every family has one. Anyway, I stupidly brought the thing downstairs, along with its ball, and downstairs is where my makeshift writer’s “office” is. Needless to say, Murphy's law being the determining force in my family’s fortunes, the six year old at some point missed her shot and bounced the ball all over my laptop, permanently disempowering it. Literally. I can't get the thing to take a charge or turn on, no matter how many times, or how hard I tried hitting it, the damn thing won’t turn on, even after I angrily tried jamming the charger into the charging port as hard as I could multiple times, still nothing. No little orange indicator light to tell me all was well, which means all is not well with my little Chromebook and it’s time to call it quits.

Luckily we have a backup laptop. We squirreled a laptop, which actually turns out to be much nicer than my little Chromebook ever was, from my wife’s work during the Covid lockdowns and which she still uses when working from home. Anyway, while we were looking for any other alternative to using this laptop, I had nothing to write with besides my phone. Unfortunately, through this long labyrinthine process, I found out I can only use my phone for writing when the seed of a story is fresh and fertile in the soil of my mind. It doesn’t work when I have to use it to jump start the whole engine.

Which got me thinking, while rocking the three year old to sleep for the second time tonight, that when it comes to tools, familiarity beats out quality every time. The well worn, but crumb filled keys, the habit of motion, made it so I didn’t have to think about where to put my fingers next, they instinctively knew where to go through steady practice, like an old delivery horse, back when that was a thing, knew the journey it took every day so thoroughly, it never had to plot its next step. It simply went. Sure the horse is old and has a sore left flank and a limp in its hobbly back right knee, but the horse also has an advantage over the racing colt back at the barn, it knows every inch of road on the entire delivery route.

It knows to dodge the pricker bush that sends out its lone tendril far into the road as soon as you turn the corner of the sharp bend. It knows through steady repetition, which holes in the road to avoid and which ones are inevitable, all of which frees up the driver from steering so he instead has time to think about his troubles, dream about his loves, ponder the prevailing issue, worry about the rain, or the next delivery. So, it was with my little Chromebook.

Sure, the keys needed vacuuming and loading a website was as frustrating and long a process as getting a disinterested teenager to empty the dishwasher, but at the end of the day, you still love the teenager. They are so engrained into your life, even the sound of their breathing, though enough to set you on edge the rest of the day when they lurk behind your neck for no discernable reason, you’ll surely miss that sound when they’re off to college, right? You’ll miss it, surely? You would never trade them in for a less annoying, more willing teenager that jumped at the chance of freeing you up from having to empty the dishwasher yourself. Although, as I write this, I’m beginning to talk myself out of my original point, which is that whatever poet or bard who came up with the old saw is wrong, and that, in point of fact, familiarity breeds contentment.

So what if the F key on this new laptop actually works and doesn't require me to check whether or not I typed the F or not every time I strike the key, and if not, force me to go back and hit the key seventeen times, forcing me then to erase the sixteen extra F’s with a muffled roar that I have to turn into a sigh of frustration because my entire family is asleep upstairs? I already know before starting my writing journey every night, that this frustration is the inevitable path to finishing another written piece, just as the metaphorical horse knows to avoid the metaphorical pothole in front of the metaphorical Kern’s place before it even starts its route every morning. The ease of knowing your way around your own keyboard is its own reward, as it frees the mind to do the heavy lifting of directing the overall purpose of the trip itself.

So, I miss my little Chromebook, even with the advent of this new and improved machine. In time I know the hulking Lenovo with its perfectly spaced out keys, all of which are clean and actually work, at least for now, I know someday, they too will need their own vacuuming and it, too, will annoy me with its webpage loading time, as well as with its own sticky key, just like my little Chromebook did, and which, I’m pretty sure, now that I’ve typed all this out, is going to be the I button. By then, I won’t want to replace it, either, because my fingers will know the course of the hulking Lenovo as well as they ever did with my little Chromebook, and as well as any metaphorical old delivery horse ever knew its route.

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