IN DEFENSE OF { AND }

SIT AND THINK

Have you found yourself wondering, as I often have, sitting at home, alone, about the untouched keys on your computer keyboard? The ones with that glossy factory-veneer still winking back at you? I bet if you leant over and sniffed them you’d still get that new electronics smell.

Switch the light on a moment. The lamp beside your smoking chair will do - No! Don’t get up. Make yourself comfortable. Light your pipe, unbuckle your belt, throw your pantyhose across the room if that’s what’ll relax you. Don’t walk to your keyboard, or don’t look down at it, if you are using it right now - I know you want to! No, let’s use our imagination for once - no search engines allowed here, we’re not taking the easy way out anymore. You can’t google your memory - not yet at least and I’ll be damned if you can anytime soon. 

Now: I want you to remember the moment you unpackaged the keyboard, or the machine the keyboard is attached to. Pray tell.

REMEMBER

Did you tear the box asunder?

Did it squeak against the Styrofoam packaging as you yanked it out?

Did you leave the umpteen plastic bags, cable ties, adapters and so on strewn about the room in which you made the unveiling?

Did anybody watch you undress your new machine?

Since then we can realise that your keyboard is a microcosm of society: bodily juices spread from Q to P, the time you didn’t wash your hands after peeing, the time a glob of your sneeze landed on B; the eyelash hairs that protrude from under your space bar, demanding rescue; the dead skin rubbing off the warmer keys; and the tarnished miscellany of stained plastic that remains (and always will be) unaccounted for. The mechanics and the accountants and the bankers and the foresters and the artists and the judges and the teachers (and so on) of your body, they all live under your keyboard.

E T A O I N S H R D L C U M W F G Y P B V K J X Q Z

Where do they live? It depends on your occupation, or how you occupy yourself with your keyboard.

The rough areas can be found under the buttons indicating the letters V, K, J, X, Q and Z. There is little movement around these areas, and unless you start writing science-fiction novels or naming planets, you’ll find you won’t have to go down these neighborhoods very often. Stay with your E, T, A, O, I, N and S, and if you occasionally have to venture out of bounds, do so carefully and for god’s sake don’t act the mug or you’ll only draw attention to yourself. The other letters are the office blocks, the industrial buildings, the motorways and the other constructed ephemera that pepper the transient spaces of our green earth with grey, grey, concrete.

The punctuation is where the elite live: ? ’ ” , . These men and women and torn arm-hair follicles make the journey twice a day to the numbers 2, 3 and 4 where they run the stock markets of your keyboard. Every time you denote currency with a press, you tickle their tummies. You know the rest: ENTER is an old reliable whore, ready for a press when you are my dear; the neighbourly hatred between SHIFT and CAPS LOCK knows no bounds; the ALT key that will never find out it has a sibling across the wide space bar, jokingly referred to amongst the upper classes as The Void.

THE MORAL

But spare a minute for the old parts of town. The buttons that were left behind in the pressing-boom during the great domestication of the computer, the very ones that now make up the wooden-boarded facades, the houses with broken and cracked teeth, and the bent-out-of-shape lampposts (a relic of some drunk's midnight cruise for a alcohol-refill back in ‘86), and the piss-stained walls of London red brick. 

These are the sad homes that ne’er get a look: in fact some of you may have forgotten their existence. To the right of P, you will find { }. Do them a favour. Next time you write an email, throw in a couple of { and }. It will mean the world to them.