Words Lost to Electric Current
Today my hard drive in my laptop died. Out of the blue. No warning or courtesy call. It just up and died after the battery ran low. It was as if it lost its will to live as the computer ran out of juice. Maybe it was in love with the battery and it didn't understand that it could be recharged. And so, like Romeo, it took its own life as its love went into a deep sleep. Needless to say, the battery was quite taken aback by this once she awoke, sending the whole system into flashing folder icons on my screen, which I can only assume are my computer's way of expressing deep grief.
I took the computer to the manufacturer's store today and they said it would be ready to pick up in 5 days, once they have ordered and received the right components needed to repair the machine. Unfortunately, all the data on the old machine will be lost. For the most part, this isn't a great tragedy. My computer was relatively new and, as such, most of the information on it was brought over from my older machine. My greatest loss was all the work that I had put into a writing project that I have been working on in my limited spare time for the past year or two. I had backed up a very rough version of it before the summer, but all my revisions will be gone forever. Pages from a typewriter lost in a fire.
The thought of having to start over again, of rewinding my writing life several months, is both exhausting and a relief. I mourn the hours of typing and deleting and retyping and the fruits of that time that are now lost in a place that zeroes and ones go to after they die. But the other side of me is relieved. I have an excuse to never revisit my work. Ever the critic, I wasn't thrilled with the results up to this point, but now I can always wonder if I was just being too hard on myself or if it might have actually been alright. This event has mythologized my efforts: "Oh, yeah, I know this one isn't very good...You should have seen the version that was lost on my hard drive...that one was really something."
I took the computer to the manufacturer's store today and they said it would be ready to pick up in 5 days, once they have ordered and received the right components needed to repair the machine. Unfortunately, all the data on the old machine will be lost. For the most part, this isn't a great tragedy. My computer was relatively new and, as such, most of the information on it was brought over from my older machine. My greatest loss was all the work that I had put into a writing project that I have been working on in my limited spare time for the past year or two. I had backed up a very rough version of it before the summer, but all my revisions will be gone forever. Pages from a typewriter lost in a fire.
The thought of having to start over again, of rewinding my writing life several months, is both exhausting and a relief. I mourn the hours of typing and deleting and retyping and the fruits of that time that are now lost in a place that zeroes and ones go to after they die. But the other side of me is relieved. I have an excuse to never revisit my work. Ever the critic, I wasn't thrilled with the results up to this point, but now I can always wonder if I was just being too hard on myself or if it might have actually been alright. This event has mythologized my efforts: "Oh, yeah, I know this one isn't very good...You should have seen the version that was lost on my hard drive...that one was really something."
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