Most readers labour under the charming delusion that authorial life involves quills, cafés, slow drips of genius, and perhaps the occasional tragic sigh toward the window. This fiction, alas, is far more optimistic than anything I’ve ever written. In truth, the risks are immense. Existential, even. Sometimes mechanical.
Yes, in the age of AI-generated and fake news, the photo is authentic. No, health and safety have not been consulted.
The other week, my left Shift key split clean in two, like a tanker sheared by the indifferent forces of postmodernity. A catastrophic failure. A breach event. A sudden, violent reminder that entropy retains editorial control over my life.
Rescue attempts were made. Heroic ones. But given the key’s continuous abuse at the hands of my left hand (a hand which denies all wrongdoing and has lawyered up), the damaged component had to be relocated. It now occupies the right-hand position, where it lives in witness protection, away from the repeat offender that used to depress it—literally and metaphorically.
Reconstructive surgery was delicate. Wires were crossed, plastic shrapnel flew, and oaths were uttered in dialects no living linguist has ever documented. But the transplant was, against all cosmic probabilities, a success.
Tragically, the other half of the key didn’t make it. It slipped away. May it rest in peace. Or, if you insist on linguistic accuracy, may it rest in piece.
So here I stand, an author in mourning, soldiering on with asymmetric Shift functionality and a renewed appreciation for the fragility of things – ideas, bodies, narratives, and small bits of plastic that hold together my dwindling sanity.
Ridley Park 