This is my first time learning of this nearly useless novelty keyboard gift and I am in mourning for all the microseconds I’ve wasted in my life

If we follow Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about technology being an extension of the body, then the copy and paste keyboard shortcuts are my equivalent of a trip to one of Cyberpunk 2077’s ripperdocs. In the writing of this single article, I will use them for links, HTML code, and other ephemera. I even copied McLuhan’s name across from a different tab, which I’m sure he’d appreciate/be horrified by. I love those shortcuts. I need them. They are the wind beneath my wings, and the crud buildup beneath the bottom left of my keyboard.

I cannot say how the first tailor to gaze upon a sewing machine felt, nor the first egg-abacus attendant to behold the sorcerous ticking of the automated egg timer. But I think now that when they saw those things, they were afraid. As I am afraid now.

I am afraid now. I highlight the above words, and reach to press Ctrl+C. My curled pinkie finds its target instantly, but my index finger hesitates. Sense memory rushes through synapses. Somewhere, a rodent’s heart beats as it chews pensively on a bin bag yoghurt splotch. A moth’s wings flutter as it practises scaring the shit out of someone in the shower. A cascade of pigeon poop plummets into a lunching office worker’s quintuple-named Starbucks drink, ironically making it taste slightly more like real coffee. My index finger finds its mark, so quickly as to be indistinguishable to anyone as a lapse in cohesion.

Anyone but me.

I am afraid now. I type these words manually, refusing to cast aside yet more of my fleeting mortality to the micro-micro-microseconds I’ve now identified between my pressing of Ctrl and V. For I now realise what that ‘+’ symbol has taken from me. A gulf of time and possibility. A gaping wound of opportunity. A subtraction in mocking masquerade.

I have seen the face of the cosmic jester that jabs and japes at the apex of all realities, and his name is the Copy and Paste 2-Key Keyboard SAYO OSU Keypad Hotswap One Handed Mechanical Gaming Keyboard Cherry Switch RGB Backlit Mini USB Keypad for macros or Rhythm Games. Which is just the sort of bollocks you’d expect from him, honestly.

I am afraid now. I am typing this manually again. It feels, in some small way, like an act of reclamation. One less layer of simulacrum in the chain of words on a website, copied from words in a document, copied from words in a dictionary, copied from soundwaves uttered by human mouths, inspired by abstract concepts, material realities glimpsed and filtered through subjective experience, dreams where someone offers you a grape but there’s a tiny version of your own dad living inside the grape and you say “I can’t eat that, it’s my dad!” and your dad shouts from inside the grape “but you must, son. You must.”

Perhaps I must. And perhaps I must also purchase the Copy and Paste 2-Key Keyboard SAYO OSU Keypad Hotswap One Handed Mechanical Gaming Keyboard Cherry Switch RGB Backlit Mini USB Keypad for macros or Rhythm Games. I’m actually genuinely curious to see whether it makes my life any easier. Maybe I could set up little macros for Total Warhammer. Maybe I could finally start to live again.