To Think - Perchance to Click
The arm settles into position. Familiar and yet provocative with the latent power inherent in its abilities to navigate the Metaverse.
The wrist seeks its resting point, often irritated with the sharp edge of a desk, or crumbs that dig into skin, or the sweaty, disgusting stickiness of a sweaty and worn wrist pad. The elbow gyrates around this pivot point, thus attempting to raise and lower the hand as the fingers wiggle around seeking the optimal position. Fingers flaying gently like the arms of an octopus, gently, so delicately, seeking the location of the mouse without moving it unnecessarily from it current location on the screen. The little fingers and thumb, curling around the warm plastic, recognizing the curve, relishing the control surfaces, take up positions in the optimal locations to be able to rapidly respond to the electrical impulses of our brain.
The fore-fingers are posed with respect for their vast potential over above the mouse, a slight, reassuring tap - tap to gain confidence that they are ready and able - but are under strict constraints to not disturb those buttons!
Relaxing only slightly, the 2nd finger may rest on the seldom used right mouse button, thereby increasing the capabilities of the first finger to strike(!) the left mouse button. This location is worn with human sweat, oil, lotions and grease from 1000 snacks and worse. But this is home for this finger. The wrist and forearm, and especially the supernaturally over-developed muscles on the back of the hand, are tight with the maintaining of this most unnatural of poses. This estranged finger, always held precipitously above this rarely used button, stressed and tight with the inactivity, forced to always maintain this DEFCON 2 alert level. With the inability to move except in that praying mantis-like sway and bow, compulsively touching the right button, its home base - this finger is the loneliest finger. It is the poor bastard that is always looking for work but rarely finds it. If not for context menus, its life would be one of starvation and deprivation outside of a few custom graphics packages.
But all of the minor fingers, they have found their home.
These ‘grasping fingers’ and thumb spend hours upon hours per day after month after year here. Safety nestled on the sides and top of the mouse. In their way, they grasp and relax, unconsciously, feeling the tackiness of the residue of their toil here, calculating with all the precision of the great martial arts masters how and how fast they can engage and disengage from the mouse. For these are the moving and lifting fingers. They propel the mouse cursor on its journey through of miles upon miles of pixelated territory.
With the arm resting on the outer edges of its calloused and perpetually irritated and annoyed inner wrist, twisting away from its natural bend to meet the needs of a mouse resting on a flat surface…
The grasping fingers engage the mouse.
The mouse cursor discovery mission is now underway.
Swish left and swish right - executing well-worn and practiced mouse cursor location algorithms. First the calm gentle movements of a willow tree in a gentle evening breeze. Then, after some fractions of a second, the process automatically escalates into a circular, more frantic motion that we have learned will cause *significant change in location* of the mouse, motion that should be easily discovered by eyes of average attentiveness. When, as the time allocated to this mission starts to expire without success - often frantic, screen-scratching-like panicky motions are executed, as mental alarms start going off, adrenalin and other noxious chemicals are pumped into the blood stream, and deep-seated insecurities shakes our confidence level in response. Previous traumatic episodes where the mouse was disconnected from its mouse cursor flash before our eyes which generates fear and trepidation in all parts of the mouse-human symbioses framework.
After some amount of stochastically distributed amount of motion and time,
the eyes have aquired a visual on the mouse cursor. The hand-eye coordination engine of the brain is now fully engaged.
What happens next is random motion if the brain has not communicated any immediate goal to this engine, more to do with the noise level inherent in any system as sophisticated as the brain, like airplanes circling waiting to land, like a tiger circling a prey incapable of escaping, but perhaps most like the eyes of a child delighted with everything it sees - attracted to the odd shapes and bright colors, the idea of touching them all but perfectly content to just look as the goal-directed ‘lets do it’ part of the brain takes a breather.
After some eons in terms of the processing power available to the human mouse-wielder with average mental facilities, a goal forms. Something elegant, yet joyfully ape-like in its simplicity; to click, to double click, to drag, to position for intercession by the keyboard. The eyes roam, pinballing back and forth across the screen, locating landmarks, acquiring and discarding previous targets, narrowing its complete attention to the desired screen real-estate; an area with boundaries no less insubstantial to the user than those of created by a picket fence, or the urine of a primeval beast from the darkest depths of our reptilian memory cortex.
The grasping fingers happily, giddily swing the mouse across the pad toward the desired location. For these few fractions of a second, with a goal now within reach, with large probability of success…the involvement and coordination of the brain, the hands, the eyes - the contentment is extreme. The world, for this fleeting moment, finally makes sense and is under our complete control - conforming to our will as if we were a God - hurling bolts of clicks and drags in response to our Will, traveling down our arms and out our fingers in bold deliverance of the fate - the fate of the Petri state of the program on the screen - and thereby to so impact the Real World that we really live in - often more virtual than hard reality in even the most healthy of lives in the Information Age.
The fingers move. The mouse moves. The mouse cursor on the screen moves. Is the mouse cursor closer to or farther from the target? Are we going too fast? Are we veering off course? Have we sailed past the target? Make corrections as necessary. Over compensations are accepted and are fed into the feedback machine that we have engaged to handle getting the cursor from where it was to where it is going to be. The intentionally programmed non-linearity of the speed of the mouse cursor with respect to the speed of the mouse is handled with out blinking and extensive work on the part of the brain. The goal is All and it is enough.
Then, during long distance operations there comes a time when the question must be answered: Will the mouse make it all the way to the target in a single operation on this tiny little mouse pad? Perchance will we have to Lift and Backtrack and Lower?
Listen with am attentive ear in any office and you will hear the patting of little mice as the hit the mouse pads over and over again as they reach one edge of the mouse pad, are lifted, moved back to the opposite side, and placed back down on the pad. The grasping fingers, along with the wrist, now reaches beyond the isometric, past the kinetic, into the anaerobic. This is where the weight of the mouse, the precise character of the curve of the mouse’s side panels, the texture and tactility of the material itself - friction that is beneficially increased by the sweat, oils and foodstuffs left over the hours of serious activity - is all evaluated with respect to Liftability. Because now the mouse must be lifted. Casually. Swiftly. The goal cannot be obscured, tarnished, swapped out, interfered with by this need. For by lifting and back-tracking to the other side of the mouse pad, we are extending the mouse pad’s usable dimensions to what can pass for infinity with respect to the requirements put upon mouse activity by any reasonable program - the Lift and Backtrack technique is necessary and sufficient to allow is to use our mouse to move the cursor anywhere and everywhere on any screen.
The wrist lifts the mouse, grasped firmly by the grasping fingers with the clicking fingers positioned well away from the mouse buttons, wobbling in a somewhat embarrassingly idiotic characterture of a curious beetle bugs inquisitive antenna. A difficult side-to-side motion of the wrist is executed, the muscles of which will remind us later is unnatural when repetitive. At this pint, efficiency of achieving a greatest distance possible is compromised in order to maintain a fixed location of the wrist - for lifting the entire arm to obtain the maximum distance per Left and Backtrack is left for those special times when either emotional release is desired - whose telltale signature being the greater noise of impact as the mouse is slammed down into its new location - or some amount of physical exercise is desired, the meat and bone arm needing to move after long periods of inactivity.
The mouse returns from its aerial maneuver to the mouse pad in a gentle, yet swift motion. In all but the most exquisitely performed landings, one edge of of the mouse touches down first, followed by the others in a two-point operation - accompanied by a rattle of mysterious internal parts of dubious integrity. Like the repetitive motions when brushing ones hair with a handle-less brush, multiple strokes are required when traveling long distances across the extensive real-estate on large, high-resolution monitors.
Zooming past the target is handled with aplomb as the hand circles back, taking it a little slower each time, circling like a hawk after strangely still prey. As the distance shortens, as the hand slows and tension rises, the mouse is pushed harder into the pad, friction rises, eyes narrow their focus, and attention and human oversight returns. The mouth may acquire a pseudo-malicious, got ya, appearance we reserve for these solitary moments of triumph.
The location we programmed our brain to use our hand to move the mouse to is at hand. We wake up and start thinking again after the relatively long period of spacing out while the body completed this physical operation we assigned it, time we get to fuck off waiting for our meat machine to drive the mouse to the target. Now it is time to re-evaluate our high-level goals here. The operation about to be performed is checked against a list of known hazardous and unprofitable operations. Will this operation destroy data we do not want to destroy? Will it in social embarrassment? It all boils down to answering the question of whether it result in something that can be classified as ‘doing something stupid’?
The 1st finger tenses. Does this mouse require a curling, grasping motion? Or perhaps a pushing motion? Can we use gravity and just let our finger fall on the button to execute this click? Is the point of contact to be the tip or the fleshy pad of our finger? Or perhaps will it be the side of the finger - toughened and nerve-damaged from all those clicks over all those years.
But these are questions that have been answered a long time ago when we first met this particular mouse. Or perhaps all the way back to when we were young and we first learned to ride our first mouse - some decisions, like how we hold a pencil, are peculiar to each person and have no rhyme, no meaning.
But all this is of no matter.
The button is pushed. A gloriously satisfying click is felt and heard. The world has been changed.
[In the spirit of and in dedication to Neal Stephenson’s description of the first bite of Captain Crunch cereal described in his book Cryptonomicon]
