AN EDITING REVOLUTION FOR PHONES & TABLETS

                THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Good morning, Del! Ready for the big day?" "Sure, what do you have in mind?" "A tour... to a place you've often seen but never noticed." "I like it already. Where?" "A page in MS Word." "Eh? Microsoft Word? I must've done two-thirds of all my work there - even starting before Windows. If there's one place that holds no mysteries for me!" "So you might think, my sweet bundle of mashed-up bones, so you might think!" "Okay, I believe you, number one because I have to and number two because I want to. But may I ask why?" "Yes, of course. You feel that you were unjustly removed from the telephones and tablets of the world, correct?" "Well, I can't say 'unjustly' - there wasn't any room for two deletion buttons, so they left the big guy - they left Backspace... but all right, yes, it hurts." "What if I told you I could

               THE STORY OF DEL - Delete This is when life support apparatuses should ALSO be clamoring, thought Del. Not only when he was about to die, but also when he was about to live! La Vita è Bella! "How did you get in?" "After we met, you never let me out, remember? So, I'm not here," she said indicating the whole ICU, "I'm here." She touched the side of her head. "That's terrible. One wrong impulse and I could turn you into a carrot juicer!" "I know, but you won't, because I have a job for you. And it's right up your alley, and since you like me so much, I'm going to be your muse. And you and I are gonna be too busy having fun!" "Whoa!" And just as Del had ruminated, all the warning bells went off and it was a concert of ringing, singing, wailing and bling-blinging. And one of the apparatuses - Infusion Pump N° 17 regulating Medication Line N° 23 - even started playing the bagpipes. To hell wit

              THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Except she didn't budge and remained at the center of his thoughts, close and real, sometimes lingering in view of his third eye as if actually visiting him there, close to the end wall of the Intensive Care Unit, a zone that among themselves, the health operators called 'Row Hopeless.' Naturally, no visitors were allowed, so whatever was going on with Juula was more like a 'visitation,' but either way, he eventually decided that it was all good. Of course it was! He was thrilled to have her there by his side! They were silent visits. Most of the time, she'd just sit there by his bedside showing a strange annoyance while writing notes on her phone. Little huffs and once even a discreet sigh of disbelief. Del was too keen on looking at the water-and-soap honesty of her beauty to wonder about what she was doing. For at least a full hour he had contemplated the 'perfection' of her tortoise shell barrette and the aubur

             THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Del came back to his senses chastising himself. Lucidity, lucidity at all costs! Machines don't beg doctors to kill patients! Lucidity, damn it!!! How is lucidity obtained when in a coma? he wondered. And as always, because of his experience, the answer came instantaneously: prayer. He mumbled a Rosary. And in the middle of a Glory Be, out of the blue but with poignant clarity, he remembered a moment well after he had been banished from the keyboards, but shortly before the 'additives' - the damned drugs - had lost their magic. He had met a marvelous Estonian girl, marvelous because she was so pure and clean and straight and unsullied by drugs or cynicism or attitudes. Juula was fresh and had honest twinkles in her eyes. Del had been entranced. But after all the bad living he'd been through (with the worst yet to come) for all he was bedazzled, he had refrained from courting her because for the first time in his life, he knew with

            THE STORY OF DEL - Delete And Del?  Well, despite it all, Del was doing pretty well and occasionally even having a good time. With the possible exception of a pinch of Lebanese Gold he had once smoked at a party back in his 'clean days,' the drugs used to manage his coma (surely not induced!) were far better than any of the stuff he could have scored at the streetside tiendas. And the round-the-clock IV feeders were sustaining him with all kinds of vitamins and minerals, the equivalent of 7 nutritious meals a day, probably to compensate for all the garbage bin repasts of 'the bad old days.' Del's mind would zone in and out, but when 'coma-present' as opposed to 'coma-absent' he was  paradoxically more constructive and logical than he had been in ages. He saw things not only with a sharper edge, but with a form of self-deprecating tri-dimensional detachment. For example, it was instantly clear to him that all the 'doodoo' stuff he

           THE STORY OF DEL - Delete And at long last, it would be great to have another American saint. Of the 10,000 saints venerated in the Roman Catholic Church, fewer than a dozen were from the United States. Whenever Father Oregano thought about this anomaly, the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team came to mind. For as there was not enough snow in Jamaica to favor sledding champions, in America there was way too much adoration of filthy lucre - 'the devil's dung' - to foster sainthood. Hell, in the USA even local cafes and pizzerias were quoted on the stock market and generated bigger revenues than the GNPs of most 3rd world countries. In any case... If the identity of this eventual benefactor and future saint was still a question mark, his demonic counterpart had a name and a rap sheet as thick as an encyclopedia: the driver of the offending Toyota, a certain Hilario Baltazar, had stolen the vehicle and at the time of the accident had been even more wasted on drugs than De

          THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Chances are that if the motor had been running on fossil fuels, he might've heard something, turned, and seen it coming. But the damned car made about as much noise as a junkyard refrigerator. It wasn’t fair! Un-doodoo! The impact on Del's body was catastrophic, like a meteor landing on a bag of potato chips. The only three parts of him miraculously left unscathed were his hands, eyes and iPhone. For long months, the beeps on the life support systems attached to his splintered remains would abruptly flat-line and issue jarring acoustic alarms that had medics, nurses, and organ harvesters scrambling to his bedside. But each time, with a rattle and a moan that stubborn clump of cells called Del would pull through. Father Oregano, who ran the hospital's Catholic chapel, was already calling it a miracle. The only problem was finding the holy person responsible for Del's prodigious survival. What happens when major miracles  - obvious mira