Write about your first computer.
My first computer wasn’t mine.
It was my old man’s.
He had an Apple IIe back when Michigan still thought a “home computer” was something you yelled at. My father collected firsts the way other men collected regrets. Not to brag — to know. He wanted to see how the future worked before it decided what it was.
That machine sat in our house like a glowing confession booth. Green letters on a black screen. The future, stuttering.
Mine showed up in 1997.
By then, the future had learned how to sell itself.
That was the year I became that guy — the one who corrected people at parties over a commercial.
“Jobs didn’t write that,” I’d say, beer in hand, moral high ground wobbling under my feet. “That’s beat poetry in a business suit. He just stole it and slapped a logo on the ribs.”
I called it blasphemy — using dead poets to move plastic and silicon.
But I respected the hustle.
Because in one clean, arrogant move, he didn’t sell you a computer.
He sold you a seat at the same table as Einstein and Gandhi and Picasso.
Buy this machine and maybe, kid, you’re one of them now.
I couldn’t tell if Jobs was in a garage somewhere burning his fingers on a soldering iron…
Or just the best preacher Silicon Valley ever produced.
While all that was flashing across the TV, I was in my room discovering a different sin.
I started writing.
In 1997, writing poems on a computer felt like cheating on paper. My classmates were bleeding into notebooks, breaking hearts in cursive. Love songs, death songs, soft-focus misery.
I was staring at a screen, trying to figure out how to be a hard version of Sylvia Plath without driving my own car into a lake.
I tried pretty metaphors. Lakes as mirrors. Souls as reflections.
I hated all of it.
So I wrote my first real poem instead:
“Dionysus and the Silver Spoon.”
It was about a man who treated excess like oxygen. A drunk god in a borrowed suit who thought the world owed him women, wine, and a standing ovation.
It wasn’t mythology.
It was me with better lighting.
And that’s when the joke landed.
There I was, calling out Jobs for dressing up as Kerouac…
While I was wearing Plath and dead gods like a Halloween costume, hoping someone in the room would clap.
That computer didn’t teach me how to write.
It taught me how to look at myself without flinching.
It showed me the hunger. The vanity. The quiet little prayer every creative mutters when no one’s listening:
Please don’t let this be invisible.
So yeah.
My first computer wasn’t a machine.
It was a barroom mirror at 2 a.m.
The kind that doesn’t care who you think you are.
It just shows you who’s still standing.
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