Monday June 27th, 2005
I'm rather bummed. I just lost some work. And I don't think I'll be able to recover it --
It was the damnedest thing, too, I was on ICQ with an Impoverished Noob and this guy really had a lot of
energy -- even through ICQ -- you know when you can feel a person "pushing", "tugging", "nipping" at ya even by way of IM, you've really got something there -- and, in spite of the fact that I was
bizzy as fuck with this now-lost treasure I was writing, I engaged him and -- not un-roughly. But he hung in there. Finally, I tell him -- "Look, gimme 5 minutes, and I... I'll call ya on the phone. Yes, with my actual voice..." So he goes away, and during this time I create this Thing -- I guess you could call it a
Document -- and it's loss was so terrible to me that I just held my face in my palm for about 3 minutes, before I could begin to try to figure out what happened to my computer. Like I said it was the damnedest thing. I actually BEGAN the post in another thread, but then I thought maybe it should be here, instead -- and I'm going to assume that at least
some of you will understand me when I tell you it was nothing less than a
moral crisis -- deciding which thread to post my already-written piece in.
It was reminiscent of this
post
Let me give you just a bit of background on some of my writing idiosyncracies and superstitions -- you can Imagine that, for a guy like me, losing work is pretty fucking devastating -- so, in an effort to protect my writing from -- let's just call them "Losses I cannot reconcile immediately against a greater Necessity", I have developed all sorts of little, weird routines (enacted solely in the glow-filled triangle between mouse keyboard, and screen) that produce, at least in me, a feeling of invulnerability -- my headphones are on, just as they are now, and my fingers are moving with all the grace of Swans across the surface of a Lake, the muse is in full-seduction, and will have her way with me, then leave me spent... No, it's not the time to go letting anything run down the drain. You can imagine that my little rituals are filled with lots of fanatical flurries of Ctrl+S and Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, carried out in swift sequences that minimize the time spent traversing the abyss -- and by "traversing the abyss" I mean: DATA=CLPBRD, DOC1SAVE=0, DOC2SAVE=0 --
. So, picture this, okay -- I am RIGHT THERE, all stretched-out with one leg in Heaven and one leg in Hell (I won't tell you which way I was going, though --
), having made up my mind about where to drop that BIG POST -- it doesn't get any clearer than that folks -- I am in the proverbial
Moment de la Choix , packing the MOTHERFUCK SIDEARM, when...
! -- pzzzzt -- !
The last thing I saw before the monitor winked out was his ICQ window opening -- you
struck me, my friend, you changed things more than you can know -- but I am not upset. In fact I am dying to speak to you, to find out who you are --
I am going outside for a smoke in 5 minutes -- calle me 51
-2
5-
65 -- 5 minutes
2HP