Ink on Paper (Originally published on September 16, 2006)

I have written a great many words. What has been a continual question in my mind the last few months is the medium. I still think of putting ink on paper as somehow a different form of writing than aligning bits in ether.

It is romanticized in my view. It involves a purity. It is unforgiving. A pen is incapable of spell checking.  Any edits are clearly marked. It carries more inflection than anything electronic can. The pen strokes, the distance between lines, the grammatical errors, all have their story to tell.

But the hundreds of pages of longhand lack something... they have never been read. Words without wings. The thoughts of one person which wil never see the light of another's eyes.

Truly, what is a story without a reader? Even if my sprawling prose was shared with others, they would require an interpreter. The years of putting ink to paper have not made my penmanship any more legible. In fact, the need to get the bombardment of thoughts and ideas down has left, in some cases, a collection of glyphs the author finds difficulty to decipher.

There will always be a time when a worn out old journal and a pen will be the vessel of words. However, I've started to lose the notion that words captured on paper have any more weight than the collection of 1's and 0's I'm generating now.