I Am So Popular: All Is Not Lost (But a Lot Is)

So when I heard the weird noise the computer was making, and saw the flashing-question-mark-inside-file-folder sign, I told myself not to panic. Do Not Panic. Then, being a slave to Apple, I whipped out my iPhone, pulled up the internet, and googled flashing-question-mark-inside-file-folder. Apparently, my computer was shot.

Fuck.

I did two things right away. I called Warren and I did the dishes. The latter was, I think, some sort of Luddite instinct. I don’t have a dishwasher. I use a sponge and liquid soap. This is very low-tech. My brain, perhaps trying to let me know technology is overrated, immediately set me to the grounding suds-and-water routine, a reminder that at least I can count on some things in this life.

The call to Warren was also rather innate—when life goes to shit, it’s nice to have a partner at the ready to console. This Warren did swiftly and brilliantly and with palpable compassion, likely because he is an engineer-head, data worshipper, and spreadsheet lover. The man may not have the same, swift, over-arching emotional response as I do when we encounter a Chihuahua in a tutu, but my decrying the loss of god-knows-how-much data prompted an immediate and heartfelt response. Oh, baby, he said. I am so sorry.

Then he told me the Lawrence of Arabia story.

Driving to the Apple Store, praying in my own way that a fix would be at the ready, I observed the wild thoughts that filled my head. When I later explained these to a friend, he summed it up neatly: “You wanted to go back to the land.”

Well, yes. Either that or drive off a bridge. I was so painfully, acutely aware in that ten-mile drive of just how overly attached I have become to all things Information Age. I fantasized selling my house, taking the tiny profit and heading out to West Texas to live my days out in the car with my dogs. (This is always my default escape fantasy, I’ve had it for years—me, holding court daily at the Marfa Bookstore, my hair growing long and white, any words recorded done only in ink, on paper, longhand.)

Being at the Apple Store afforded me an opportunity to revisit technology in a major way and so, unthwartable, I posted immediately on Facebook news of the crash and the irony that Dave Matthews was singing, Crash into me… over the in-house speaker system. I was rewarded instantly with consolation comments from across the web. This cheered me, a little. As did news that the hard drive crash was due to a design flaw and so the new drive and its installation would be free.

As for the old drive. So far, the data experts tell me that, barring investing $900 for a “clean room” retreival, I’m screwed. It’s hard for me to rationalize spending money I don’t have on data I mostly don’t need. And that, readers, has been the old-message-new-package I have been trying to convince myself these past days. We—all of us—accumulate so much more than we ever have the time or use for in our lives. We diligently record with our computers and cameras and day-after-the-party gossip sessions so very much that, when we stop to immerse ourselves in it, we lose the very moment we’re in.

How am I doing? Am I convincing you? Am I convincing myself?

While I’m sure that, in the next six months to a year, it will occur to me just what I lost that I could stand to have back, for now, I can only think of two major losses. There’s the novel, which I was so enjoying working on. It was my heroin and writing it was a little reward I offered myself here and there to take my mind off of this other book I’m researching, that is daily chewing my ass up and spitting it back out at me. But I know, I do, that I can rebuild that novel, make it better, faster, stronger…

But what of the research for the history book I have been contracted to write and which is due in mere months? Isn’t having lost all that breaking my heart? Curiously, no. As it turns out something—call it intuition—had prompted me to email Warren an early draft of what I’d written and, just a day before the crash, I’d mailed in my first chapter, a hefty 13,000 words. If I’d lost that then, yeah, I would be in West Texas by now.

But I can recreate my lists of sources. And—this is so peculiar—for some reason, for this, my sixth book, I decided to write it the old fashioned way. Using skills learned in high school, I took almost all my notes on 3x5 cards, and photocopied massive stacks of articles from a research library in Nebraska. I still have all that. So the only other thing I am desperately missing now is the transcript for an interview I conducted with an expert in Wales. Luckily, I have an excellent real memory, and so even some of this remains, if only in my head.

I’m not calmed down enough yet to really, truly be okay with having lost so much. But it’s funny how I hear, in my mind, my mother reminding me to think of the worse off. Lists and images and recollections pour in—friends who’ve lost kids and siblings, my college roommate holing up with me for weeks on end during Hurricanes Rita and Ike—wondering if her Galveston home would be there when she returned. I think of my father and his decade long losing battle with Alzheimer’s, ultimately winding up like my hard drive—some ancient data intact but anything recent gone before it registered.

And, on a lighter note, I remember that bag of pot, circa 1987, Knoxville, Tennessee. I was high enough one night to be paranoid enough to imagine that any minute the cops would bust in and cart me off. I hid the baggie then, hoping to stave off time in the Big House. A new day dawned and with it no memory at all of where I’d hidden my stash.

Sometimes, friends would help me search. I wrote a blues song, ode to lost contraband, that went like this, If I were me, where would I hide my pot? The longer it eluded us, the greater the mythical proportions this baggie took on, until in my mind it was a missing bale.

I found it when I was packing up to move one day. Of course it was only about three stems and two seeds worth of skunkweed, nothing to write home about, certainly nothing you could roll up and smoke. It was a lesson learned, or relearned, about how supply and demand can warp our perceptions.

Warren, by coincidence only, has started converting my old VHS tapes to DVDs. It’s a realtime process and sometimes I sit and watch the captured moments of my son’s long gone babyhood spill across the screen. I’m glad for these tapes—that I haven’t lost them. But at the same time, I think that might be okay, too. For in them I see so many things I once had and treasured—the old blue thrift store couch, the word processor (!), the silly toys. Those are gone now and, if not for this video reminder, I’d never have missed them.

Likewise, I am reminded of past relationships, long gone, men I’d actually rather not be reminded of, preferring the eternal sunshine afforded me when my mind has rare spotless days without their ghosts floating in. But what I do see in the tapes, what I have still, those old cliché-but-true things that matter most: my kid, my friends, myself. A garden, a cat, a voice.

Spike Gillespie is trying hard to accept the beauty of a fresh start. She blogs at www.knitbuzz.blogspot.com and www.spikeg.com. There are only two more Dick Monologues shows ever, and the next one is May 13th. Email spike@spikeg.com for tickets