Paper

God I love paper. The feel, the smell, the sound: the only thing that comes close to the appeal of pen/pencil on paper would be the click-clack of a mechanical keyboard (anything less than a true mechanical keyboard is blasphemy.) It’s just so much easier filling a sheet of paper with stuff than a word document, the stuff doesn’t even have to have any meaning to anyone other than you the stuff maker. For example, buried in my bedroom somewhere is a notebook with pages of sentences written in a code language I don’t even have a cipher for anymore. What’s more, on those pages are several decoy ciphers that only solve maybe three entire sentences while rendering the rest as word salad; it took me the better part of an hour writing that shit out in the first place.

There’s something romantic about paper, if you’ve ever held a book you know what I mean (if you prefer eBooks, that too is heretical.) Thick, sturdy paper has a sense of gravity about it, a sense of importance in its heft. Someone sends you an email and you’re all like “eh, I’ll get to it later,” but receiving a hand written letter (or a typed letter on sufficiently thick paper) and the story changes. “I have to read this right now.” Every meaningful amalgamation of letters is printed on paper; love letters, paychecks, eviction notices, etc.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, putting words down on paper has a more intimate expenditure of time associated with it than typing on a screen. That’s an important disparity to notice.