My computer died and was ded this week. Terrible thing. All of my phone numbers, addresses, appointments.. all locked in a little metal box. And broken. Cats lost the ability to taste sweetness as part of the evolutionary process. It streamlined them, made them a better predator by keeping them from foraging. Apparently I have lost the ability to put anything at all worth knowing down on simple wood-pulp paper.
Eventually the big guns were called in and my friend Frank spent up an entire night reinstalling the OS, so now I’m in the midst of rebuilding my computer into my home. I’m not attached to any place, you see, only people, and the way I speak with them, well.. here’s Johnny!
It’s liberating to have a keyboard again, to be able to write and upload my photos. Something’s wacky with the soundcard though, which, gee whiz, is sending me around the proverbial bend. No music! I slept on the couch last night because there’s a stereo in the living room. I find myself singing like a wind-stranded sailor, as if somehow that will bring signal back through the wires. Silence makes me strange. I can’t stand it. I’ve even dug out the radio, brain damaging pop-tart advertisement machine it is. The local stations are all either Guns & Roses style “classic rock” worship, bitches in da’ back hip-hop, or aggravating schmaltz dipped in bleeding violins, but I seem to have found a good (accidental) halfway point between a candy coated station and some local ethnic signal that’s leaking into it. It was a little hit or miss – when I started it was a reggae spanish-guitar Jesus Jones, and somewhere in there something really fascinating happened to Beck that I just can’t pin down, but right before I left the house it gives me Kylie Minogue with bouncy bollywood sitar all through it. It sounded strangely like a really cheerful chinese re-mix of that Disney song, “We Are Siamese If You Please”.
Terrifying.
That said, my game-designer friend James will be staying with me a couple of nights still before he jets off to the GDC down in San Fransisco, and as he’s the one who gave me the computer in the first place, I’m sure he’s more than qualified to fix it. Thank goodness for small mercies. It’s a comfortable couch, but not half as much as my bed.
