Death Of A Computer

 It’s been three weeks, three weeks without my computer, the headquarters of my brain where a good two thirds of my life is stored. How did I get to such a dependency on a machine and a  machine without a soul no less? Certainly, there are folks who would dispute that, but, of course, they are wrong. Just because it talks does not mean it has anything to say. Now, some forty years after losing my virginity to an archaic, fifty pound desktop with a screen the size of a credit card, it’s become an appendage. Remember that fifties movie, “Donovan’s Brain”? A man’s brain outside his body dictating what he can and cannot do? No academy awards there, but a glimpse of something frightening and imminent. And then the internet was conjured into existence. My world became more complex at the stroke of a key. 

It wasn't always like this. Way back in the fifties when I fancied myself a Beat poet, a ballpoint pen, even a pencil stub, and the closest scrap of paper was just dandy. This method evolved to yellow legal pads and felt tip pens of many colors, then typing it up on a portable Olivetti or another brand I can no longer remember which I took to Italy where I wrote my first screenplay. Why Italy? Why not? I was Edward Albee’s stage manager at the Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto, and so I thought, what the hell? Florence was just a ways north. Stick around. This screenplay led to my first IBM, the purchase of which was one of the single most exciting times of my life, way better than my first sexual experience which wasn't very good at all. But that first IBM? Whoa, what a ride! What a high! Mazel tov. I was a success. Then along came computers. My first one was not unlike my first whirl at serious sex - ignorannce redux - awkward, confusing, frusttrating, serially unsatisfying. It was years before I worked out the sex thng, but the computer had to be mastered right away, one computer after another, until I finally got it, well, sort of got it, enough for me to pound out a manuscript anyone else could read. No more cut and paste. No more trying to read my own handwriting. No more White-Out. No more carbon paper and yellow copy pages. Revisions infinitely easier. Writing has never become a breeze, but losing the grunt work was a saving grace.

So, what have the past three weeks wrought? A huge hole where my words used to be, and devolution - scraps of paper I promptly lost, dried out felt tips, cheap ballpoint pens from local political campaigns stuck in the backs of drawers, ideas left hanging, “precious” thoughts dissipating like cigar smoke. What was the good in all of this? For starters, I wasn’t seduced by internet ads into parting with my hard earned dollars for stuff I never thought I needed. For another, I read books.

Now that I’ve got my computer back, is my world once again a delightful place to be? My little world may almost be that, but my bigger world still has Trump and his traitors in it, and will have them in it most likely the rest of my days. Anyway, I’m back now and don’t feel like kvetching , although I could at length but won’t, not this week, anyhow. Stay tuned.