BC and AD Have New Meanings

Two facts have become clear as I assemble my web site--my work has evolved and so has the computer.

The computer's development has become a timeline for my own evolution, demarcating the phases and projects of my life by whether I was using Word Perfect or Word, 5.25 floppies, 3.5 floppies, e-mail attachments, zips or flashdrives for storage and transfer--and in some embarrassing instances, if what I wrote predated the advent of the computer in my life.

Yes, there are very good manuscripts that I would like to include in my opus that were never digitalized. Digitalized--turned into 0s and 1s, reduced to a boolean essence--is a word repurposed by our present way of thinking to signify purification, a rebirth. "Your work, my son, was once only words on a page, ink on paper, a mechanical and merely physical process, but now it is reborn as data..." Blast of child soprano voices, a thunderous Hallelujah!"). These pagan manuscripts must now pass through a scanner.

Although I have a new scanner, and purchased it as soon as the previous one died--demonstrating its indispensibility--I rarely use the flat bed. In fact, I dread using it. I know that I should not feel this way. The scanner is familiar hardware, dating back more than twenty years, and it runs more or less like a copy machine. Yet, as sleek and inocuous as it is on my desk, the scanner might as well be an inquisitional rack.

For using the scanner to transform massive physical into fluid digital is torture. The process incorporates the tedium of xeroxing with the cruel finality of "the wizard"--a program that intermittently asks the user if he wishes to save his changes while warning him portentously that if such changes are saved, original formatting will be irrevocably lost.

Such a dilemma triggers traumatic effects. Once, while digitalizing my first book, all 500 pages of it, I came to the crossroads where the Wizard asked if I wished to save my changes and warned me of all that might be lost. Unwilling to sacrifice anything of my first book, I clicked Do not save changes, which meant that the previous hour of fixing typos and messy keystrokes on the newly scanned manuscript was wasted, the work irrevocably lost.

The scanner is not my friend because it makes me face the two blunderers within--the mechanical moron who misfeeds pages into xerox machines as a rite of passage and the digital dunderhead who stumbles through simple formatting procedures.

Worse, the scanner makes me confront the new BC and AD that chalk off my lifespan with ruthless candor--Before Computer and After Digital.

I fall somewhere between.