If you’re male, you probably acquired, when you reached the brink of adolescence, a machine that burned gasoline or shot bullets, and with it you risked your own life and endangered the lives of others. It took you far from home and gave you an early taste of adulthood’s dark cracks. When I was 14, I acquired a typewriter. An aunt of mine, a high school teacher, had rescued it from her school’s defunct typing classroom in Michigan, and in doing so she rescued me, too. With a manual Olympia typewriter as my companion for the next 10 years, I endangered myself and others and let it take me far from home so it could give me an early taste of adulthood’s dark cracks.

Read the rest of the piece and see photos of my typewriters here.