Today we gather in memoriam for...or is it "memorium?" I am not the world's greatest speller...anyway, we pause to remember a valued friend, a keeper of secrets, a sharer of things not of this world and yet of it, a thing that helped us get through college and wouldn't question why I am using the royal "we" at this moment because we just happen to feel it is appropriate.
Godspeed you, laptop computer (2005-2012).
Age was the most likely culprit, along with my woeful ignorance of computer matters and my insistance that if you just shake it, it will work out alright (I believe negligent parents use the latter of those two as a defense). Perhaps the hard drive can be saved, perhaps not. All I know is, since a ill-fated trip to the library to update my iTunes library (and update I did, apparently deleting all but 120 songs off what was once a close-to-2000-songs library), and my less-than-copecetic response to said deletions, I am now the possessor of a useless slab of black computer marble. Unlike the apes in 2001, I don't get any smarter just by touching it. But no one messes with my water source now that I can use tools, thankfully.
Mine is not a loss to be mourned much except by me, and even I'm fine with it, in the end. I didn't have the Next Great American Novel stored away on the hard-drive, just a bunch of random essays that I could easily re-create given time and a willing computer partner. Indeed, if I were in the midst of school work this would be a far greater loss. As for the iTunes, while I've sold off a good chunk of the "hard drive" stuff (i.e., I got a lot of CDs and just burned the songs to iTunes, which I'm sure infuriated the ghost of Steve Jobs), most of the songs I really loved are either on the original disc still in my collection or on one of the numerous mix CDs I've made over the years. Plus, if and when I get a new laptop, I can simply start burning the CDs I have back into iTunes (hint: I've had to do this before, when an unforseen error deleted my library a few months back and I sat through the process to do so yet again so that I could enjoy Al Green and Bon Iver whenever I felt like it). Music is all around, of course, and while I am putting my iPod on hold until I can afford a non-computer-jack iPod charger (they're cheap, but so am I), I can enjoy the radio.
Christ, the radio...well, I'll pop in CDs in my car for the ride home.
Anyway, I will miss my laptop, if indeed it's a dead parrot. The jury's not out yet, but odds are this is the perfect time to be looking at new technology and making sure I can't kill it just by touching it. I'm a little like Lenny from Of Mice and Men when it comes to technology; I didn't mean to, George, honest, I was just petting it and it bit me and...Anywho, Shakespeare wrote with a pen, Vonnegut and Salinger had typewriters, and one day we'll simply write with our minds, letting our fingers rest. It's going to be okay.
As for the iTunes project I was doing here, don't fret: I did plenty of essays before the crash that are on a thumb-drive, so I can still do that for a time. And I will one day have another computer, but for the time being I can still get my internet on at the various libraries where they know me by name ("hey, asshole, you still owe twenty cents for that copy of The Erotic Adventures of Benjamin Franklin you checked out and never returned").
So adios, large unwieldy slab of concrete-heavy laptop glory, you will be missed. Not by my back, but you will be missed.
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