So Far, So Good

So this is it.

I can develop the technique of whacking the space bar on this keyboard. It's almost like playing a musical part where, at the end of each phrase there is a heavy accent.

The space bar(whack!) has to be hit like a rim shot snare after each word, but it is actually workable, thanks in part to Steveland Morris and the album pictured. I can type in time with an album that I was aware of, back when it came out.

I was 11 and had just won a radio station contest with the prize being that the top 15 albums on the Boston charts, in the summer of '73, would be delivered to the doorstep of our ranch style home in what wound up being 2 separate brown-paper-bag type paper wrapped (excuse me)

quadrangle shaped packages in the approximate dimensions of the box to the left with the name of such a shape defined...

The first package arrived just a few days before our family was to leave on a 2 week vacation on Cape Cod. It contained a typed note under an official WBZ-FM letterhead, explaining that some of the top 15 albums had plumb sold out, even in that behemoth of a city 50 miles, or exactly one hour, usually, away.
In my 11 year old mind the city was about 9 times larger than I eventually realized it to be after I was much older. But I imagined there must have been at least 25 record stores there in which to search for the top 15 albums on the Boston chart.

The Boston part turned out to be significant in that I got "Aerosmith," by Aerosmith, sometimes called their "self titled" one, which hadn't done well enough to make any top 15 lists outside of Boston. They were "the bad boy's from beantown," with that image underscored, I guess, by having the band on the cover looking like they might play you some rock and roll or maybe kick your ass.
I always thought of that as "the pendulum" swinging back from the Woodstock era, which had ushered long hair in as a fashion for young men -It was because enough girls liked to run their hands through it that, why would you want to cut it and wind up looking like a baby killer, so freshly back from killing that your killing crew cut hadn't grown out yet, type of thing.

Stevie Wonder's "Songs In The Key Of Life" is a true masterpiece that wasn't in the top 15 of the Boston rock and roll charts, at least not by the time I would have gotten it. It was probably bumped out by The J. Geils Band's "Bloodshot" album,which came on red slightly translucent vinyl.that was one of the more flexible records. I remembered the older records, some of which actually said "Unbreakable" on them. They were very stiff and hard to break but they would shatter...

The note in the first package promised that the remaining 7 albums would be sent as soon as they arrived in Boston. I thought about writing back to them asking: "Well, you play these albums on your station, so you must have at least one of each; could you just send me those..?" I would have thought they might have a direct pipeline to the record company's marketing people.I'm sure they would have air mailed the station a brand new Paul McCartney's "Red Rose Speedway," had they left their copy on a sunny window ledge or something...

So this keyboard with the stuck space bar key, might actually have ties to Alex Carter, whom I believe mailed it to me back in 2015.

At the time, my laptop had some keys that didn't function. I actually had all the characters I couldn't produce in a small text file that I would copy and paste into whatever I was writing if I needed one. An external USB keyboard hadn't occurred to me; I must have thought I would have to download and install some driver specific to whatever brand of keyboard it was.

I tried to liberate the key the other day and wound up making a comment somewhere that's body was like 27 pages of spaces. I began to imagine a message of 27 pages of spaces being part of some diagnostic that the keepers of the algorithm use,which, when sent resets that person's profile, overwriting it with nothing. I will know if the Ellen Alverdyan ads stop popping up everywhere...