Let Me Punch Your Buttons

[Lightning Rod]

Buttons

I'm sitting in the dungeon (cleverly disguised as an office) here at Lightning Rod World Headquarters. I hear the hum of the torture machines. Normally I would say that it's too early in the morning for paranoia, but then I began noticing the buttons. I knew it was hopeless when I began counting them.

First there is the digital camera, a marvelous little device that while no bigger than a deck of Pall Malls, will take pictures that can be available on the world wide web in minutes. It also records sound and makes movies. The manual that came with it is six times the size of the device itself. As small as it is, it has 16 buttons (one of them a four-way directional button) and one dial with eleven incomprehensible icons on it. Then there are various little trap-doors for chips and batteries and plug-in jacks.

From the manual, which is in six languages, I have also determined that one of these buttons is a 'function' button that changes the meaning of all the other buttons. Maybe if I read the damned thing in Spanish I will understand it better.

Then each of the computers has at least 110 buttons, not counting the external drives. Then the printers about ten buttons apiece, that's twenty more. One mouse has six buttons and the other has four. Add the two pianos, one with eighty-eight keys and the other with 61 keys plus 41 buttons and a dial. (190 in all)

There are fifteen buttons on my flute and about twenty-five on my clarinet. The walkman sitting here next to the camera has nine. So far that a little over five-hundred.

And then there is this incomprehensible little fax/phone/copy machine which is no bigger than a cigar box and has 28 buttons (one that moves six ways and has little plusses and minuses on it and god knows what it does) and if you throw in the handset there are 25 more buttons.

I'm not counting light switches and thermostats or clocks or the eleven buttons on my shirt, or peyote buttons, but without leaving this chair, I can count nearly 600 buttons. It's no wonder I'm going out of my mind.

Excuse me, I have buttons to press.

lrod

[firsty]

never count the buttons
never listen to the bells
never stare too hard at ceilings full of holes
dont step on cracks
or whores
or bedbugs
or beds
where whores sleep
dont fiddle with the keyboard
(thats the monkeys' job)
dont plug in anything upside down
dont look at the sun
dont play football with your lover
dont mess around with peanuts
dont chew on electrical wires
unless theyre purple (not black tho)
dont stick your finger in a fan
unless he says you can
dont eat anything that lives in a bag
dont flick things
dont lose your extra buttons -
the ones at the bottom of your shirt -
you might need them in a pinch.

[Lightning Rod]

I think you've hit on the solution here, firsty

It should have been obvious to me

we let the monkeys handle the buttons

(lr smacks his forhead with his palm)

[stilltrucking]

dont stick your finger in a fan
unless he says you can

[Zlatko Waterman]

Dear LR:

In 1965 ( I was 20) I enjoyed a very brief career on the burgeoning campus FM radio station, where I played old Stanley Brothers records and archival recordings of Doc Watson and Mississippi John Hurt and other bluesmen.

I had to engineer my own show at first, in that primitive analog age.
The control panel with its dials, buttons and faders was spread out in front of me, taking up half the glassed-in booth of the studio. I sat bug-eared with my Koss headphones on ( in those days they weighed about seven pounds) and gazed at the buttons.

There were two which commanded my attention:

My favorite was a red one with white letters about the size of an "MandM"-- it said:

ATTACK


The other one was under the console and shut off all the power in the building. Its inscription was the better of the two:


DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON !

( and it really did have an exclamation point. It was black and the size of a 50-cent piece ( also not currently in circulation . . .)



--Z

[stilltrucking]

speaking of pushing buttons and punching someones ticket.
"I don't punch anybodies ticket" Stephen Gaskin.

I want so bad to be a writer. I mean a good writer. Not this slop I post here. Because if I had any talent I could use different user names. Have one a real nice guy, then have another who said vicious things to people just to punch their buttons. But all I got is these got dam hand puppets. I can't hide.