I write at night. Often in bed. Long before I was using a computer to write, I would read in bed and pick up my notebook and let all my thoughts flow. Back then I was just discovering the world. The world to me is not travels and people, but the inner world of thoughts and feelings, emotions and power dynamics. The world that I was discovering wasn't something they teach you in school. It was everything that was unspoken, not fully addressed. I sat most nights rediscovering what others had also rediscovered as they began thinking about the world on their own. Everything was novel. Discovering lies was novel. Investigating subcultures was novel.
I still write at night and in bed, but now on a computer. The same passion to share what I have discovered that's new about the world diminishing. I learned it the hard way, but I found out that it doesn't matter what I discover no matter how new or profound. Sharing it won't make much of a difference. Besides it isn't something that people don't know. On the contrary, a great many people who know certain things are actively working to drown them so that they lose prominence.
All of that doesn't matter, the whole point was that I write at night often and I take my computer to bed in order to do that.
I lack the motivatin to shut everything f and speak t my cmputer as I often spoke to the blank piece of paper in the past. As if that's nt enugh, I'm facing a new prblem. My laptp's keybard has brken dwn. Nt all f it, just ne key. It's the O key. I have to pound it hard as I type so that it wrks. Often it just doesn't and I have t delete and then write it. It breaks the flow f my thughts. So nw I try pounding and sometimes it types and other times it doesn't. Nw this paragraph is missing a lot f Os that I wasn't able t pound hard enugh. The words look weird but I wn't correct all f them.
It's increasingly difficult to write without that key. My usual writing all comes flowing, gushing from my mind, with my hands trying to keep up with the translation of my thoughts to words. For work I have an external USB keyboard but that doesn't work in bed. The missing O breaks the flow. I'm not as fast translating my thoughts to words. I have to go back to words I write and correct them, and then I can't remember exactly what I wanted to say next.
But long before losing that key it was difficult to write. I think the same way, I just don't share it. I guess it's only now that I realize that long before I lost the O key on the computer, I may have lost an O key in life that has made writing difficult for me. Somewhere along the line I lost something that made me have less hope in the meaning of sharing what I write.
I ordered a replacement keyboard that will arrive in around a week or two. If only my other missing key can be replaced. I'm tempted to say I lost that key in Egypt during the revolution, but that's not true. During the revolution, a two year lifetime, I had the passion to write and discover. I lost the key later, in Egypt and all over the world. I lost the key when I saw that striving for the truth was worth little in the face of manipulation, fear and self interest.
The masks of western rhetoric fell ungracefully as western government, much like the petty corrupt officials I saw in Egypt, raced to kiss military brass ass in Egypt in exchange for lucrative business deals. Whether it was Germany for their Siemens and submarines, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Spain, or the US for various other reasons, it was all the same. They were cheap and regarded their own values as cheap or perhaps just up for sale.
The diplomats, once revered in popular culture now appear to me as nothing more than mercenaries in suits. They are the front for the business henchmen behind who profit at the expense of other people's lives, not just in Egypt, but around the world.
Power is the same everywhere. I recognize it too easily now. That's my missing key. If only I didn't recognize the nature of power, I would still be hopeful and discovering the world, but more than that, sharing in the hopes that people seeing reality would help change it.
There's no vendor that sells the key to my writing and sharing. I think I'll just have to pick up the pieces and try and put it back together again.
