Home from work, I grab my iPad and open a Scrabble-like game that ingeniously allows me to compose words with players half-around the world, or in this case, with my sister who lives in New York.

Of course, I can’t get any satisfaction by whining that she’s taking too long or demanding that the word she just put on the board does not exist in any language. She beats me no matter what I do.  We usually compose one word a day. The app keeps score, never asks for a pencil or a napkin upon which to tally numbers. It has a built-in dictionary and referees all questionable words. Sometimes I don’t agree with its calls. The computer sanitizes the playing field.  If I keep losing, I am the only one at fault.

I also have a second game in play with razzledazzle11 who lives in parts unknown and faithfully adds his or her word to the board on a daily basis. I don’t know if my opponent is male or female and have stopped trying to intuit some gender from the game board.

Once I contribute my daily word to both my sister’s and razzledazzle’s games, I push Scrabble or its app look-alike aside. This has been a warm-up to the real game, Super 7.

I discovered the app  as a new user searching the Internet for top game apps. It looked simple enough, no terrain to cross, no monsters to dodge, no virtual worlds to build. (Did I also mention that the download was free?) All the game required was to connect numbers with a swipe of my finger, draw a line so they would add up to seven. Anything above seven produced a screen of angry skulls. Easy. A great pastime to avoid doing serious stuff like dishes or laundry. Super 7 begins with numbers slowly entering stage left and right, cascading from top and bubbling up from the bottom of the screen with a soothing melody playing in the background.

On first play I panicked, my breath quickened. Numbers rained in from all sides when my primordial brain and sense of survival kicked in. I realized that others may have their Mario Brothers, but I had Super 7.  Here was a game that helped me to practice life lessons scaled down to their breathtaking simplicity: to relax when under assault, to allow the innate motion of things to play out before necessarily responding, to ensure that there are never too many variables in play at one time, and to understand that larger discs do not move on screen as quickly as smaller ones, and can often lead to angry skulls. As a person who loves metaphor, I read things into the game that probably their creators had never intended. But no matter.  It worked for me. It was a great training for Project Management. Over and over again I returned to Super 7 to see if I could beat my high score and to enjoy a new-found cool in the world of shit happens.

Where had I been all these years? Instead of reading books, I should’ve been at video arcades perfecting my hand eye coordination and driving vehicles up the vertical side of mountains.

I do note, however, that my opponent is no longer a person, but a software routine. Chess master, Gary Kasparov who has been practicing with computers for many years, probably does a slow ho-hum right about here. But even as I exclaim hurray! after beating my last high score or when I don’t, what a pile of dukey, I realize that Super 7 can’t provide me with a real person.  Of course, that’s not why I play the game and there are innumerable flesh and blood people in my life.

What concerns me is that with cities and the federal government constantly slashing budgets and making the social needs of people a diminishing return, our tax dollars are being invested less in the public space, and more in private worlds that let us create virtual realities and relationships. The public space also has allowed the Occupy Movement here in the United States to take hold.

Entertainments are wonderful and needed. Maybe they scale better than real life. But I think it’s important for us to hear and see each one another, to take in and rub shoulders with the entire person. To make our voices heard. Our encounters with ideas, music, and people are increasingly lacking context. So much floats around us and slips through our fingers. Here’s a pitch for the concrete. After all, I’m a child of cities. I think it’s important for children to have schools, parks, gymnasiums, and playgrounds. I think it is important for all of us to have common areas. Defend the public space.

Two words come to mind: space and money.

The limitations of my physical living space led me after so many years, to return to the public library. I could borrow books and return them without a need to covet their pages on my personal shelves. Then there was the question of money. Books like everything else have become enormously expensive. Those two factors pushed me toward accepting in this case, the iPad, an aesthetic device that made me feel better about being a traitor to the printed word. But I forgave myself. Didn’t Gutenberg turn everything upside down with the invention of printing press, making knowledge accessible to people who never had the chance?

I got over my initial hurtle, which has opened a new relationship to the book. The word has been liberated from its covers in the way that songs were released from their place inside albums and CDs, floating around and alighting on my forehead.

My first e-book read was “Distrust That Particular Flavor,” a nonfiction collection by science fiction writer, William Gibson.

While I’ve been aware of Gibson, my sci-fi reading has mostly been limited to authors like Harlan Ellison, Robert Heinlein, and Ursula Le Guin. That might change. Anyhow, Gibson’s book struck me as a good place to begin my experiment. I downloaded a copy from the electronic marketplace. Here are my initial responses.

Whoa! This is a different place. The change is absorbing me more right now than the book.

I don’t have any sense how “far” I am into Gibson since the book itself is a flat screen and I can’t physically hold any number of pages in my hand. What I hold is my iPad, a device that doubles and triples as a browser, a game center, camera, and so many other things that is only limited by the number of “apps” I have downloaded from the Internet. As Gibson would say, I had suddenly moved away from a “function specific device.”

What I hold is not a book, although I could be resting on my bed propped up by pillows. But the device itself is not a singular one. Although referenced by one brand name, an electronic reader can be a pliable platform, capable of being transformed as soon as I finish reading. In fact, I can listen to music on the same device while I read. And the difference in the physical experience doesn’t stop there.

I’m not physically aware of the place I am relative to the entire manuscript. Without a physical book, I can’t see where I place my bookmark. Of course I know when I begin the first page, but as I continue, the only marker I have is the page number displayed at the bottom of the screen. The iPad conveniently inserts its own electronic bookmark, automatically opening to the page where I left off. The electronic book eliminates the obvious beginning, middle and end or “linear” quality of books.

No longer recognizably moving along a trajectory from point A to point B until I put the book down with hopefully a satisfied exhalation, I am just always “reading.” What I am left with are individual words that have been freed from their book covers, naked as they were, to travel the Internet

I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing. It’s just different. Maybe reading Gibson is helping me to think this way.

The truth of the current matter as it currently reveals itself, is that e-readers are not as portable as books. Why? Not because they’re difficult to carry around. It’s mostly because people aren’t comfortable using their high price tag devices in public. There’s always a chance that someone will swipe an e-reader and not in a good way, either. Until these readers come down in price, I think they will continue be used in private, relegated to the bedroom or couch or airplane seat, places where if I lose the thing, it’s my own damn fault. On the other hand, iPads today have a means of tracking themselves so if someone pilfers my iPad while I’m reading on a bench at Oakland’s Lake Merritt, I can get a GPS location and pass that information along to the authorities, scary as it may seem. I’ve also heard that certain classrooms are now beneficiaries of grants that allow groups of kids to carry an iPad in their backpacks to and from school. But for now, I think most people, like myself, will opt for carrying their paperback to the beach and keep the e-reader of whatever kind, for more close-to-the chest encounters. I could be wrong.

On days when I’m sick or stay in bed on the weekend, I opt for the comfort food of a paperback book without the need to run interference with an ID or password.

Sometimes I crave the old-timey public kind of space.

Around Lake Merritt
I have a lifetime pass to humanity
with its necklace of lights
strung around the throat of Oakland,
the first designated wildlife refuge for birds.

To get there, I drive past storefronts—

Cut it Out Again Tammy’s Bible Book Store
Rose the Tailor Happy Garden
Chopsticks Express Runaway Slave Tattoo
King Kong BBQ Wash Time
Bail Bonds 877 You Walk
Yummy Duck Divine Doors
Tim’s Auto Body Juan’s Pizza

Lake Merritt where kids ask
if ducks fly and water bottles roll from the suck of lips,
ear buds and pay pals eat time,
money is on everyone’s mind. Honk if you think
I’m full of it. Lake with its necklace of lights
strung around the throat of Oakland
for all us strange birds.

Monday, February 13, 7 to 9pm
Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Avenue
Berkeley (near University)
Open mike follows

Saturday, March 31, 4 to 6pm
Rebound Bookstore, 1611 Fourth Street
San Rafael
Open mike follows

Friday, April 13, 7 to 9pm
Nefeli Cafe, 1854 Euclid
Berkeley (between Hearst & Ridge Road)
Open mike follows

Saturday, May 12, 7 to 9pm
Laurel Bookstore, 4100 MacArthur Blvd.
Oakland (above High Street across from Lucky’s)
(Reading for Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down with Manja Argue, Carol Dorf, Grace Grafton, and Judith Offer)