Sunday, April 24, 2011

Monsters Of The Page

There are some awfully insidious and malicious forces out there. We stay on guard to look after ourselves and those we care about, but ultimately there's only so much that we can do personally. Because we want full peace of mind, we turn to others, be they some kind of professional or even a machine. The whole point is that we can sit back and relax, only can we? The reality is that vigilance is all the more necessary is such a case. The thing that worries me at nights comes when I cam writing, and is none other than the typo that forms a different word than the one intended.

The spell checker remains too stupid to work out what would be an obvious mistake to any human, and that would assuage my fears of a robot uprising if there weren't the more immediate annoyance of having to proof read my work personally. I don't think I'm actually that good at it, and perhaps no one is given that multiple sets of eyes are employed by the properly wary. For all I know this very post is riddled with words which aren't what I meant.

I see these words as some kind of sentient being, something like a gremlin. You're familiar with them outside the context of those movies and the car, I hope. It was something conjured up by the imagination of aviators to explain inexplicable failures in their flying machines. The idea of a little devious monster wrecking the craft was less scary than the idea that such mishaps would happen for positively no reason. At least I think that's how all that goes.

Just like those gremlins, making a living thing out of those words is how I lessen my anxiety. It's like an intelligent, reasoning string of letters that manages to outsmart sophisticated computer software. What else could do such a thing? Now, since I've decided that it's a living thing, I can combat it according to the rules that govern the living. I can physically confront it or swear at it, and these things will have a beneficial effect above and beyond the relief of stress that those things bring. Don't worry about me- I've found the solution, and you can too!

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