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I remembered when I first learned …

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Burden of Bobby Angel

To use a typewriter.

Performed to Dylan’s It’s Alright Ma

I was in twelfth grade. Cumbersome at first, and plodding. I didn’t much see the point. And then it clicked — and I was off to the races typing lightspeeds faster than I could write. The irony was in 10th grade, just two years before, my brother typed my American History paper (Topic: Should Eisenhower have crossed the Elbe River Faster?) for me. That makes me laugh because to this day my brother types with two fingers. It’s painful to watch, whereas I mastered using all eight fingers and both thumbs.

Fast forward three decades later I have to remind myself to even pick up a pen. And how quaint even now a typewriter seems in retrospect. Increasingly, I’m too lazy to even thumb out an email, let alone a text with ample impossible to interpret autocorrects — and even resorting to just audio transcribing into my phone to respond to texts and emails. What is the world coming to! Oh, and how the mighty have fallen. If my 18 year old self could see me now, I really wonder what he would say. Instead of reading books and handwriting long letters to distant friends, here I am lost in my thoughts of how things used to be. I’m not saying the typewriter was a slippery slope, but what I am saying is that this song stayed handwritten. It never got typed out or saved into a computer as a Word file.

The topic? My then boss was turning fifty, 2 years younger than I am now. At the time, he seemed so much older, but maybe that’s because everything is relative. What’s that saying: “Better late than never?” Final note: I couldn’t make the big event, but not wanting to be left out or contribute in someway, I wrote this song — and here’s the funny part: I recorded it on a cassette tape. No joke. I wonder if Ron still has that tape now, and if so, and probably the more impossible feat — If he has a tape recorder to play it on?