NATURAL TIPIST

I’ve never made it past the second week of a typing class. I am no more than vaguely aware of any structured method of finger placement on the keyboard, nor touch typing, nor any other methods of typing for that matter. However, I do fancy myself a rather naturally skilled typist.

The other night, last night I think it was, I sat at my keyboard and, keeping my eyes on the monitor, proceeded to type the alphabet. I wanted to see how far I could get, how often I could hit the correct letter without looking at the keys. Each mistake would lead to the start of a new line.

On the first line I typed up to the E before hitting T instead of F. I hit the return key and started my second assault.

I stumbled on I.

I sailed through the next line until I replaced R with E.

Then I typed V where C should be.

After that I followed J with L.

And so followed line after line after line of false starts, stumbles, and surges until finally I made it from A to Z without a mistake. By the sunrise my cramped, leaden fingers had typed ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ all the way through nonstop a seemingly infinite number of lines of times.

I’m typing this with my nose. It’s times like this that I really wish I didn’t have the proclivity, if that’s the correct word, to write such long, overly-worded sentences.

This isn’t my first attempt at typing without the use of my sand-filled aching hands. I thought that if I used my chin I could still monitor my progress on the computer screen. I was wrong. And besides my chin is just too wide to hit only one key at a time. I tried holding a pen between my teeth and tapping the keys that way, but I kept dropping it and biting my tongue.

So I’m stuck with a sore and increasingly raw nose. And to top it off, I had to keep my eyes closed so that I wouldn’t cheat and look for which key to hit. I even made it straight through from A to Z a few but impressive number of times in a row.

And now here I document my achievement for all to read and know that I am a natural typoseffvtrrrrrrfgdf

(1999)