The promise of wear.

| 2025-04-05

In the blue morning hours before the household is awake, I am here with a new tool.

I picked it up just yesterday, a sleek and slim new machine for writing and making music that replaces the lovely old laptop that was the color of a new penny that I gave to my mother after her own computer reached the age where it continually asked for updates that were no longer forthcoming. I’ve been contentedly working on the more modern laptop issued by my employer, but with security rules tightening after a recent cyberattack, I decided to leave that machine to its intended tasks and be a dreary consumer, chasing the hottest new thing.

It is a new thing, too, something I unpacked on the inauspicious bench seat of my old pickup truck, extracting it from glassine and tissue paper and just looking at it there in the late afternoon sunlight. These things are defiantly the product of a mature design industry, in the same way the early typewriters, as black and glossy as a nineteenth century treadle sewing machine decorated with a threadlike floral pinstriping and a logo in hand-laid gold leaf turned from trend to trend as a once-rare thing to a given, leaving us with the elegant simplicity of a mid-sixties Olivetti portable that stood as a perfect, functional machine for transcription.

It’s a splendid thing, almost, but not quite, black in a turn from my usual taste in things, in part because a manufacturer that once celebrated wild color as the antidote to the tiresome beige of the end of the last century has settled into cynical adulthood and product lines that now echo the grim monotony of the cars we drive in shades long-haul truckers describe as “asphalt,” “cement,” “fog,” and other sad shades of grey, beige, and don’t-stand-out muted versions of vivid colors.

I picked this shade precisely because of all the reviews that expressed concern that it would show fingerprints, marks, scratches, and wear, precisely because I’m not bothered by any of that, and moreso because I love the way well-used tools start to look well-used in the way people who have lived come to look like people who have lived. My brother lent me his old camera after upgrading through several iterations of an evolving technology, and I delight in the way the pristine sheen of its newness has worn away at the edges and corners in his hands as he chased down fantastic photo after fantastic photo. Now it’s my turn, and I’m a part of that object’s history, something to scratch and scuff it and to add to the story it tells even when it’s just sitting on a shelf, waiting for the next outing.

It’s silly, I know, to always be so wrapped up in the idea that things that come to us with the delicious newness of something untouched, like the velvety grey of a new puppy who’s only just met the world, and then go on to show that they, like me, have lived and seen and passed through moment after moment and times that have left a mark, yet, here I am, hands on the keys of something new. I revel in the promise of any new tool, because it lets me feel like it’s the start of something, even though it’s all been the same long, complicated trip through things.

Today is new. Tomorrow will show the brush marks, footprints, wear, tear, and scars.

It’s perfect.

© 2025 Joe Belknap Wall

The rain comes.

| 2025-02-01

footprints in melting snowI trudged back to the house from the coop with a few eggs in my basket and noted, as I crunched through the swiftly melting snow, that I could find my characteristic treads with their waffle gridwork marking my trudge ahead of me, mixed through with Daisy’s paw prints that have persisted after her by a couple weeks now, but even then, I could feel the mist turning to flecks and drops of rain, and felt a knot of tension just south of my ribcage.

Soon all this will be gone.

Soon the rain will come and the world will continue turning over, the endless cycle cycling through to the next new moment and the next and the next.

I haven’t been able to pin the shape of how I feel lately except as a color to the world, or maybe a colorlessness. It’s fair, of course, in that the world around us has turned to a river of shit, sent downstream to drown anyone with a soul by a cadre of bullies guffawing at their stunts and hijinks even as the world starts to suffer under their muddy torrent of bad ideas, but it’s not that. I grew up under the pink thumbs of bullying monsters, and watched the waves come and go. It’s only new in its naked obscenity, where the murderous past still had enough remaining life in those crackling burned-out souls for the monsters to hide some of what they are.

It’s not that, other than that’s the color of the background, the steady murky orange of the skies over burning oilfields choking under a worn-out sun.

It’s not that. (more…)

Figure out who you are…

| 2024-12-06

…and then do it on purpose, in the words of the indelible Dolly Parton. I started writing ages ago, it seems, but was a little wayward in figuring out what I am good at doing, largely because the people doing it already remained just outside of my line of sight, often obscured by the (in my mind) overly vaunted Very Important Novelist and other towering figures of literature. I write because it’s inherent to me, I think, but giving it a name, even belatedly, is a useful thing.

I write, sometimes for my stage act as a combination stand-up autobiographer and house band, sometimes entirely for myself, and sometimes for an imaginary newspaper that would print my occasional columns like a rambling and often profane aspirant to the space Armistead Maupin occupied back in the day, but I’ve been reading E.B. White as a sort of post-election therapy and I’m struck by how much of White’s take on the task of the essayist truly nails my own assortment of flaws and strengths:

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.

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