This is the third time I've tried to write a post today.  There's something fucked up with my arrow keys.  It has something to do with the undo redo.  When I press undo the redo also highlights.  When I proceed to write again the redo de-highlights, leaving undo highlighted by itself.  

     Is there something wrong with my trackpad?  Am I fucked?  Can a trackpad be replaced without me having to spend money I don't have?  As I seek answers in the internet, I ask the question various ways: the arrow keys, why don't they work?  I get lots of results showing computer users writing about their problems and other users trying to solve them.  Why doesn't somebody from Apple write a definitive answer?  Why doesn't that come up first in the Google search?  Instead, I hear about Jared's story with his arrow keys, and Maggie's. 

     It's not that they don't work entirely.  There seems to be a delay from my fingers pressing them to the execution of the task.  This thing should not behave like an electric guitar using a delay effect so that the musician has to finesse the timing of hitting strings with the sounds expected.  

     As long as I barrel forward I'm fine.  A rant works well that way.  As a serious thinker, though, I like to be more thoughtful as to how I phrase things, and I like the suppleness the arrows provide.  This computer is only three years old, a toddler.  It shouldn't have malfunctions going on yet, but we've lived in an age of planned obsolescence for many decades.  In Lord Love a Duck, a subversive film from 1965 that's the funniest anarchic comedy ever made, Roddy MacDowell talks about planned obsolescence: manufacturers of goods plan on the stuff they make failing before it should so that they can sell updated products a few years later, rather than making stuff that doesn't fail.  

     It's an idea now so obvious that consumers (the acolytes of capitalism) tend to find it worthy of a shrugging of the shoulders, rather than thinking of it as a manipulative con using people as marketing subjects guided slavishly by advertising and their own desires, which, as American wants, drive the economy forward at the wrong end of the tunnel where the light of true freedom isn't.

     My arrow keys still don't work.  Steve Jobs is still dead.  The new movie about him should have a scene or two about the topics of this post.

                                                                                   Vic Neptune