It all catches up to you, right? The inevitable, that is. Well, it finally happened. After 4 years of always having to be on, living off of a diet of second hand smoke, bad music, and pornography, my computer went off in the sunset to the great hard drive in the sky. There was no farewell, not a chance to thank it for allowing me to procrastinate in style for as long as it did. There is one problem though, this computer opted against registering as an organ donor, so getting the guts out to use in a new life is next to impossible. I am speaking with a technological midwife of sorts to assist me in getting them. All of my writing, photos, financial records, gone. Yeah. That’s what I said.

Every joke, every song, every column I have written is skipping rope on a clicking C drive. All the bills I am supposed to pay are hiding like a college roommate. All of my movies, my financial information, gone. It’s as if I simply don’t even exist anymore. There is a void in the heart of my ‘puter, and I only wish I wanted to fill it with something other than explosives.

I’m looking at it now. It’s just sitting there like a psycho ex girlfriend, holding my life hostage until it gets what it wants. Love, a clean life, a little attention is all it wanted. Instead, I treated it as a conduit for perversions, money, and my own creative whims. It was all about me. I didn’t even offer the courtesy of letting it sleep most nights. I left it on simply because I could, it didn’t seem to complain. Now, I’m paying the price. It’s holding all the cards and all the files. I must tiptoe through the tulips as precariously as I can, which is sure to fail, as I will inevitably stub my toe on something and disturb the peace. I could stub my toe floating in space, for gods sake, but that’s another column in itself.

I tried to hug it. No luck. I tried to tell it that I would be different from here on out. No luck. I told it that this was the dawn of a brand new day, that I will be a new man, but it’s heard all that before from me. Sooner than later, I will again use it as the little trash whore that it is, negating it’s innermost needs, and it will shut down in protest. There is an inherent dysfunction in our relationship that I don’t think even counseling will help. I’m willing to try, but it’s back is turned to me, exposing it’s yellow, jaundiced backside, with a grill full of lint. I’m screwed.

The midwife is twenty minutes away. Perhaps I can step aside while she assists me in retrieving my stuff. If I had only did a back up as some sort of pre-nup, then I wouldn’t be this screwed up. But, I chose not to, and now we’re through, and gone are the movies in which people screw. K. Next paragraph. Sorry.

Putting this back together is not going to happen, so I visited the best little whore house in Portland, Circuit City, and picked up a brand new one. And its sleek, contoured, with many open ports and a great set of drives. If the midwife can assist me in said retrieval, then I’ll take the best of the old and amalgamate it with the new. Then, I’ll do a back up pre nup, and bliss will be all mine. Have I ever told you that I love you?