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I am writing longhand. It's the closest sensation to painting that I'll experience. I have this image of painters in the midst of a deep concentration ecstatically splashing colors on their canvases. To add to this mythic moment, rendered in their own works, they have a half bottle of wine and with a half-filled glass at a nearby table.

My computer surprised me with a different screen yesterday. I couldn't access my blog or my Facebook. I tried a variety of passwords that I have utilized over the years and that I have written in a little brown book that I have possessed so long that several of the numbers belong to departed friends and acquaintances. I couldn't gain access to either the blog or Facebook.

I am as addicted to my computer as Mick is to his telephone. With as much writing as I have been doing lately, I'm spending as much as ten hours a day on the contraption. Besides providing me with news, sports and music as well as all other sorts of entertainment including porn, I'm dependent on the internet for my Portuguese and guitar lessons. I could go on and on with the services my computer provides, but I sure this list suffices.

I took the computer to the repair shop. The attendant, a friendly fellow with the build of a bear, a bushy beard and long hair, was perplexed with my dilemma. When we turned on the computer on his counter, I had my accustomed screens. He had no rationale for its present normalcy. Since it had been several years when last cleaned and the security updated, the computer I left in his hands.

I have a thick notebook at my work table and several pens. My memoir--The Coronavirus Chronicles--requires, as a result of my A-retentive discipline, that I write every day. With seven weeks until the national and local elections, I have written more than 500 pieces. I don't know when it's all said and done if I'll use half or two-thirds of the articles, but since the chronology is basic to the structure as I deliver a play-by-play rendition of the political action, I have to persevere on a daily basis.

I wrote two stories yesterday, one political which focused on the sheriff's race and the second on Mick's 16th birthday. I'm hoping to have my computer at a decent time today--the attendant had told me he might have it for me by the late afternoon; he didn't--and I will post the pair when I'm back on-line. Both easily qualify for Facebook also. I have seldom missed a day on The Murphy Report in recent weeks, but like typos, I never fret over an absence.

It dawned on me that I wouldn't have my computer to start today. I wrote the two pieces yesterday with a thin-pointed pen. I felt like I was scratching letters on the paper. It wasn't an aesthetic exercise. I need a pen with a thick point so I feel like my hand and fingers are akin to a sailboat cutting through placid waters. 

I found the school supply aisle at the supermarket and encountered a plethora of pens from which to choose. I dismissed the cheap BICs. Just like the painter Rubens, I was looking for pens with full bodies. As I peered closer, I noticed for the first time that the points of the pens had measurements. I found a possibility that measured .07. It seemed thick to me, but in the same manner a woman doesn't feel the true size of it until it is in action, I wouldn't know until I scribbled something on a piece of paper.

Upon further perusal, I encountered a pen that measured .10. I decided I would buy both, the two packages each containing a pair. This morning I experimented with the two. The .07 was a marked improvement over yesterday's toil, but the .10 had me gliding across the sheet of paper as if I were on a pair of skis flying down a slope of freshly fallen snow.

I have sped through this story with such effortlessness that I'm finished. This production may not be a masterpiece hanging from the wall of a prestigious museum, but it will have its admirers who will pause for a few minutes marveling that the pen isn't only an instrument that facilitates creation, but it is creation itself.