January 15, 2006

Now we can’t all go swiftly mad and buy a box of miscellaneous electronic parts at Radio Shack sweat and bleed and laugh maniacally in our basements and build our own machines that write bad poetry. It sounds fun but we can’t.

Because Radio Shack no longer exists.

In the absence of a technical solution it is often necessary to simply buckle down and write your own bad poetry. There is still room in the universe for the human hand.

Get:

• Spiral-bound notebook of angsty verse. You do carry this with you everywhere, don’t you?
• Apple PowerBook 5300. This was the last PowerBook they made with a Motorola 68000-series CPU before switching to the PowerPC chip. They hold up pretty well. Look under your bed or on your bookshelf.
• Dark eyeliner. If (like me) you don’t have any eyeliner, use a black ball-point pen.

Turn on your PowerBook 5300. There’s a key at the top right of the keyboard with a triangle on it. Triangle means “ON” in California. Give it a few minutes to “boot up.” The Mac-face on the screen will smile at you. Smile back. Take this opportunity to apply the dark eyeliner liberally around your eyes. Now you look gloomy and emotional, just like a real poet. When you’re done you’ll see the Macintosh’s “desktop.” Double-click on the icon labeled “Macintosh HD.”

This opens a “window” with icons representing all the “programs” and “folders” on your “hard disk.” Double-click on “SimpleText.” This launches the Mac’s very own text editor.

Use the “Font” menu to change the font from its default, Helvetica to something swishier and more poetic. I went with Apple Chancery. “Chancery” sounds dignified. “Chancery” sounds published.

Type your poem. See the pretty text? Whisper it to yourself: Chancery. Your poem doesn’t have to be about menstruation, but if you’re aiming for the height of bad poetry, it’s a good place to start. Extra points for haiku. Extra points for not coming up with a title more interesting and or subtle than “Mentruation.”

Under the “File” menu, select “Save As…” Once you save your poem it will be eternal. Until there comes a day when we need to detonate high-yield nuclear weapons in the atmosphere to create magnetic pulses that erase all magnetically-stored data and fry all unshielded electronics in an attempt to end the bloody Robot Wars. But you’ve got a good eight or nine years before you need to worry about that.

Type the title. Click save. You have created bad poetry. You have advanced the goals of the human race and set yourself on the path to greatness. Breathe deeply.