A Text Less Predictable

Auto-generated text as life coach, fortune teller, and poetry tool.

By Saara Raappana, Cellpoems Co-Editor

I didn’t realize what happened until it was too late—I’d already hit send. My text message was zooming down an invisible track across town to my roommate’s phone. I’d meant to tell him that I’d gotten caught in an early afternoon thunderstorm, that I wouldn’t be home for another 20 minutes. Instead, texting blind as I tried to open my umbrella while squeezing myself under the heftiest limb of a spindly tree, I hadn’t paid attention to which words the predictive text was inserting under my frantic thumb strokes. I’d sent this:

Stuck in the pain. Good soon, though.

This was a few years ago—I was tunnel-visioning through my second semester of grad school: I’d gone overly pale and skinny from staying up all night rejecting half-finished paper ideas and obsessing over my non-existent thesis while living on coffee, cigarettes, and bags of mini chocolate bars. I’d forgotten all about full nights of sleep or buying—much less eating—vegetables, and I was too entrenched to notice. I’d let myself get so out of control that my T9 was staging an intervention. Holding my half-open umbrella as the rain filtered through the tree and trickled through my hair, I was struck by both the bathetic truth of the text and by the temporality it expressed: Good soon. I didn’t bother correcting it. Tellingly, my roommate didn’t notice the text was a mix-up.

I loved the M.A.S.H. game when I was a kid, the one where you chose five possibilities in several categories to predict your future: spouse, job, car, car color, number of kids, and the color of the Mansion, Apartment, Shack, or House where your future would unfold. After generating a random number, the fortune teller counted through, scratching out option after option until you were down to one prediction in each category. I loved choosing the names and colors that would make two narrow rows of potential futures snake up and down the notepaper, loved the ritualized secrecy of the practitioner hiding her pencil to draw concentric circles until the I called “stop,” hoping to catch the perfect moment that would count right up to marriage to Johnny Depp, a reasonable number of kids, a Ferrari and a purple mansion—all that, plus a glamorous career as a celebrity veterinarian or a foreign correspondent.

But where’s the fun in perfect futures? Per the rules, you had to add some hateful possibilities to the mix. The most giggle-worthy prognostications came from the most wildly inconvenient or incongruous possibilities, when the numbers declared you’d be ball-and-chaining it with Rodney Dangerfield and 268 screaming children crammed into a puce shack while you drove your dump truck to a day job at the Pick-n-Roll. From that limited set of variables you could end up with an infinitely shiftable spread of futures.

The ultimate pleasure of the M.A.S.H. game wasn’t those lists of blurted possibilities or the random number generated by the concentric circle—those were great, as was the suspense that built as each line was deleted. But the ultimate goal came after the final variables were chosen—the technicolor strip that flickered before my eyes where a grown-up version of me tied my apron and got into the passenger seat of a plaid dump truck. Johnny Depp, in the driver seat, lit his cigarillo before driving me to my shift at the Pick-N-Roll. Two-hundred sixty-six of my 268 children dangled out of the mansion windows or held matches against the dry hedges,  screaming goodbye. The delight was in the surprise of the final product, nothing like I’d originally pictured it.

All these years later, I get the limited-but-infinite possibilities of predictive text. I’m fast on my thumbs, but with three-to-four possible letters per key, my text messages still occasionally surprise me. I try to say I’ll be there later but end up demanding to be lauded. I think I’m describing my new lipstick but end up with the clearly aloe-fortified kissstick. Money shifts to moody (predictive text can be both topical and maudlin) and a late-night weekend text about “the condition of the roads” turns to “the condition of the sober” (Public service message: Don’t text while on the sober no matter how roads you are.). I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about the ramifications of shit turning into shiv or “zombie attack” going into the cellular ether as “womb attack.”

M.A.S.H., predictive text, and the discipline of reading and writing poetry have conspired together to teach me that it’s my job to turn accidents and inconveniences into tiny blasts of generativity. Mind you, botched texts are not, themselves, poetry. I’m so far unaware of a single poem that’s even been inspired by a T9 glitch (though I may have written something close to “caught in the pain” during my 14 year-old, black-nail-polish phase). But humor me: picture Frost thumbing out the first incarnation of “no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader” as an explanation for a flubbed text.

Aside from flexing one’s metrical chops, the restrictions poets place on ourselves serve to distract the conscious, calculating—often disappointingly predictable—mind, using inconvenience and accident to push the writer toward those head-popping surprises that will bump a well-wrought poem over the edge to greatness. They take the idea or plan of the poem and shake it up, and we keep coming up with new techniques to achieve this: Everything from the surrealists’ automatic writing trances to the Beats’ “first thought, best thought” (even if it was performative), to the intricate lattices that we have to climb to achieve the rigid requirements of a sestina or a villanelle all serve to distract us into forgetting to drive the poem in its original direction; and the delight is in the surprise of the final product, nothing like we’d pictured it. Under the best circumstances, when I think I’m letting someone know a storm will make me late, what I get instead is a description of my secret self, so shockingly accurate that I just stand there and let the rain wash over me.