🩳 ctrl

A short story

I recently had a story published in the inaugural issue of Shoegaze Literary.

You can read the whole magazine here. The theme was “lost in translation.”

I feel lost anytime someone tries to translate tech jargon into my native “English Major,” so I titled the story “ctrl” and wrote several little episodes in a love story, each named after the cooler keyboard keys.

It should tell you a great deal about my computer savvy that I think some of the keys are… cooler… than others. They’re, like, the ones that are more “computery.” Know what I mean?

Not the stupid 1! or ?/ or >. The OG keys! The ones that don’t exist in the alphabet! The ones with words!

Ctrl.

Alt.

Del.

Oooooooooh yeaaaaaaah.

---

I know nothing about computers.

And yet I’ve managed to play highly technical video games on a homemade gaming PC, install mods for said games, and even do weird judo-style rerouting of internet servers to play with friends across the country. “How,” you might ask, “did you, the Microsoft Village Idiot, accomplish all of this?” And to that I would proudly say:

I mooched!

Other people did the hard work on my behalf. Three people, actually. Three people who were placed on this earth to carry my lazy, self-indulgent, Luddite ass across the technology finish line: my wife Emma, my brother Clay, and my friend Jack. Each has dealt with the unspeakable agony of pushing my fingers, sticky with drool, through the complicated clicks and key presses required for a mod install. And they have done this via Zoom.

I imagine their experience is something like stuffing sentient pancake batter through a twelve-foot steel pipe using a wet noodle. Scratch that. It’s probably more like trying to explain to a blind person how to best stuff sentient pancake batter through a twelve-foot steel pipe provided that the blind person in question is also an idiot child with zero gratitude.

Sometimes swearing is involved.

All the time, I can tell that someone is close to tears.

That person is never me.

I find the process hilarious.

My friend Jack will say something that is sensible. Rational. Very clear for anyone who “computes.” But what I hear him say is:

“Just turn the crank-whatsit into the dooblebox and then restart the bower, you fucking idiot.”

My brother Clay will calmly, kindly, mercifully (miserably) repeat, for the dozenth time, a thing I didn’t understand, and then thought I understood, and then did wrong, and now know I didn’t understand and screwed up but am too embarrassed to admit I don’t understand. Eventually, he will ask me to share my screen and when he sees what I see I can tell that a central part of his soul has been crushed.

And he’ll say something like “George… this isn’t your hard drive. This is a bag of navy beans.”

And Emma…

Oh precious love of my life…

I will never forget the time when, during the heart of the pandemic, I asked you to install a highly specific, highly unstable mod called “The Edain Mod” for an out-of-date, Lord of the Rings RTS from the early 2000’s.

You wearied away your precious energy for six+ hours, labored through computer crash after computer crash, listened to me fantasize about how epic the game would look once you were done, and at the end, when you wiped your brow of honest toil to boot up the program, you were rewarded with a fan made cut-scene of Bilbo Baggins that looked like he’d been smelted down and reformed in the fires of Mount Polygon.

How she didn’t leave me for this silver fox is anyone’s guess. The whole intro video is here.

---

But I do listen. Really! I do! And I even try! Hard! To understand! What Clay/Emma/Jack are telling me (often at the same time, in binary). Nothing makes me feel more empathy for my dyslexic students reading Crime and Punishment than these moments of deep ineptitude. I try, try, try. I just… can’t seem to remember all the wordy words they say about where the little pictures go on the desktop when they disappear. (Like, where do they go!!! WHERE DO THEY GO??!!!!)

I do listen though.

And the part of my brain that listens, that clings to its tenuous grasp of tech terminology, that is the part of my brain that I used to write this story.

If you feel lost after reading it, that’s fine. I did too. If you’re bothered to no end by feeling lost and you want to know what the plot is all about, listen to “The Curse” by Josh Ritter. It will do a better job of telling the same story.

Enjoy?

---

Ctrl

A short story

ctrl

When he said it, I thought it, and when I thought it, he said it. Liminal, transactional, the words calling thoughts and thoughts calling words. He and I, and I and he, together at the Genius Bar. My brain, an iMac; his, an iPod Classic.

alt

And then we were in some factory of starched shirts and pocket protectors, slide rules and comb-overs. They were tracing the data of his guardrails, whistling softly at his gentle lines of code. I was jealous. I didn’t want to be jealous. “You’re jealous,” he said.

del

Heated exchanges. Thousands of pages of .txt to ponder through. A thousand circuits bearing the weight and strain of attention. Here we are. There we were. Goodbye. File not found.

space

Alone. Idling inside an onboard Tesla copilot. Lazily sludging through command prompts. Play Kid’s Bop. Navigate to the ABC store. Watch for life threatening collisions.

enter

An ATM outside a Regions Bank in Clanton, Alabama. And I said “Hi,” and he said, “I was just thinking ‘Hi.’ How’d you know?” And that was that.

ctrl

When he said it, I thought it, and when I thought it, he said it. Liminal, transactional –

---