I’m looking at the word sometimes.” that has appeared in the tool bar with that period and quotation mark. It is supposed to be the word “lenitives” without a period or quotation mark in the tool bar. I thought I had copied, with my cursor, the word “lenitives” from the site where I had come across it, but instead what the memory of my cursor, so to speak, somehow held, was this other bit, or this fragment of a bit, that I suppose I had formerly copied, this sometimes.”
And struggle though I did, I could neither recall what text I had copied this sometimes.” from, nor could I fathom why the cursor had failed to “pick up” or “recall” my “lenitives,” a word which, by the way, my spell checker doesn’t respect as legitimate, and which somewhat validates my not having known about it.
So now I faced a choice, which was: did I return to the site on which I’d found “lenitives” and renew my attempt to capture or copy it; or did I rather enter the word “lenitives” manually into what I want to call the “tool bar” or “entry field” or “slot” or “search box” perhaps, which would require a repositioning of my feet and a return to an upright position, so as to make the keyboard accessible to both my hands; or did I (also manually) retain my relaxed, non-upright position, while typing it out with one hand, which is to say, with one finger, which besides being awkward and exposing me to observing the tedious slowness of hunting and pecking with one hand, I would have to reflect at each moment on the sloth that had brought me to that impasse, which would obliterate finally any shred left of the conceit I may have had that I was doing something or working on something; for a person couldn’t be working on something while typing with one finger, with ones feet propped up on the desk’s edge, even if one might protest that ones real work more involved a mental process that had occurred before the typing. (I wasn’t working and had never worked, I was made to reflect — for I had never thought. Something like this cursor was blinking was how I produced words).
I selected with my arrow icon the tab on the page on which I’d found “lenitives,” whereupon the page in full appeared, as did the post in which the word had been used. I struggle to recall at this time if the word remained highlighted by my cursor but I know I became puzzled afresh upon seeing the word in what I had come to think of as its native location, as to why my cursor had failed to “grab” the word on its first attempt. I was tangentially, superficially, aware at this time also of the content of the post from which this word had been extracted. It concerned, as I recall, assessing the health complaints of nineteenth century correspondents in the light of modern medical knowledge. The word having been entered, I went to the wiktionary tab where ‘theirs’ had previously been looked up — yes, I will still find myself looking up ‘theirs’ on occasion — rather than to the one in which I’d pasted sometimes.” in the entry field or slot, then changed my mind and reverted to the wiktionary page with the sometimes.”, the origin of which I now suddenly recalled. The definition of “lenitives” was the plural of “lenitive,” and the definition of “lenitive” was “a pain reliever, an analgesis, a laxative.” The origin of sometimes.” had been a fragment of a quotation of Cynthia Ozyck’s I had somewhere come across; it may actually have been on my own blog
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 