CYBERWRITIN

   Imagine cutting a nib from a goose feather, making your own ink, blotting every phrase just to write a note for the milkman. 

  How easy to take up a fountain pen instead. Lever-action ink bladder. I could carry it in my pocket for mobile writing.

   The typewriter! Yes! Instead of either drawing my calligraphy, which is great fun but time-consuming and I'll never be that good at it, I can slap down perfectly matched letters in lines horizontal across the page.

   Underneath this ink-slingin' is paper. Just toss a forest into that machine over there and, lo!, paper. You probably don't remember making your own, or taking it out of someone else's skin.

   Paper is great.

   Appears the computer! A wonderful machine. Who'd'a guessed that moving all that machinery from the physical to the more subtle plane of light and electricity, would free up the memory and communication of so much information?

   All writer needs at this juncture is a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, music backup, constant messaging, desk, chair, a drink, fruit, raw vegetables, fresh water f'crissakes!, and someone with a healing touch to massage the neck and shoulders.

   Somewhere up on that tower of time-consuming labor saving artifact I wake up realizing that I'm up a ways in the shaky, leaning Tower of Babylon. The history of really tall towers is not so good.
   Subtle energies, maybe an EMP from the sun, a gravity anomaly, or a magnetic flux, could just erase all that digital info. BLIP! Gone.
   Jet liner impact is a messy way to erase a mistake, but an EMP from the sun would reach deep.

   I'll be thinking, “Damn! I forgot to save AGAIN!” Hardcopy is the word. Look how long those parchment writings lasted in a clay bottle in Nag Hammadi.

   If it's really important to write, you know you've hit the mark when you write with your own blood on the cave wall.