My Smith-Corona Galaxie

Here is a picture taken 20 years ago, depicting my early high school era desk, upon which sits (buried in junk, as were all things in my teen room) my famed former typewriter, which was in fact a Smith Corona Galaxie (let us pause here while I marvel at my own remarkable powers of recall. If you knew me when, be very afraid).

Even then it was trashed, probably already 20 years old, with keys that stuck together and a chewed-up ribbon that it never occurred to me to replace, and a petrified rubber platen that the keys bounced off of like ping pong balls. The whole thing seemed a little loose-jointed and rattly, and yet with it I churned out hundreds of pages of hideous fanfic and self-indulgent diary entries, and whiny letters to my cousins about my love for Mike Nesmith (whom I still secretly adore).

Other items on my desk in this photo included a dried up carnation from my high school boyfriend, a stolen school copy of Grapes of Wrath, a thesaurus, a Hohner C harmonica, patchouli incense, a brandy glass full of Andes mints (this must have been taken at Christmas), Match Box cars, a highlighter, a Diet Coke (I haven't touched Diet Coke since the 80's), some sort of new age meditation calendar, and god knows what else, clean up your room young lady.

I kind of want another Galaxie, especially after reading You love these machines. These machines are dead. A love story (by the way, who is this guy? He's my new favorite writer) but then I hear tell that the Olympia SM-9 is the definitive analog writing machine, all the crotchety Luddite literary types swear by it, so I might just have to go for that one.

Randomly on the way to work yesterday, I pulled off into some suburban cul-de-sac, lured by misspelled neon pink poster board signage suggesting A Huge Garag Sale was in progress. It was pouring rain. Steaming piles of junk lay under four big outdoor patio tents, presided over by an old woman in a Mariner's sweatsuit and one of those jogging radios you wear on your ear. After trolling through cigarette-scented piles of paperback diet books and boxes of rusty hand mixers, tangled power cords and push-button phones wrapped in rubber bands, I gave up and asked if there were any typewriters in the pile. She lead me to an IBM Selectric, never used and complete with its 1980's space-age-Atari-font instruction book, but it was no good, I have no use for an electric. There's enough of that crap going on in my life as it is.