So I suck. I haven’t written anything in several days. Why? Because I suck. Because classes are starting next week and things have suddenly gotten very busy at work and I don’t own a computer, so I can only post at work where I am obviously too busy to post since they actually expect productivity in exchange for the packing peanuts (who knew?) and I would stay late to post only I can’t because I have to leave for other work; therefore, I have not posted.
It really stinks too because putting little meaningless nothings up on the web has been forcing me to write each day and I’ve been getting some revision in as well. Re-crafting (ha!) some older pieces I’ve been meaning to get out there, to submit, maybe someday be lucky enough to get published.
I used to have a computer. Actually, in the past seven years I’ve had three. I brought a pc with me to Virginia. Once I started school though, I realized how much time I preferred to spend writing [in bars] sitting on the campus lawn, surrounded by my fellow [drunks] students, and I used some of that financial aid money to buy a laptop. And the laptop and I were happy. We were inseparable. Most nights I fell asleep, fingers still on the keyboard, laptop on my knees. And in the morning, when I woke, there he was, lying on his side, screen all aglow with a mystifying screensaver. It was love.
I sent the pc back to my son and even set him up with an online account so we could email, but his deadbeat father used the account for porn and when the computer wasn’t powerful enough to find enough porn for him, he traded it in and got another computer for himself. So when the laptop crashed a couple years later, after the funeral service, I didn’t even have the old pc to fall back on.
I’m sure this fascinates you.
Anyway, a friend of mine, who got a ridiculously high-paying job teaching in the Middle East, got herself a new computer and loaned me her old laptop. It wasn’t my laptop, but we were still happy.
And when I moved into a new apartment after possibly the worst year of my life, and thought things were looking up, and decided to take a break from unpacking and walked to the 7-Eleven for cigarettes, I came back to find that my door had been kicked in, and the borrowed laptop was gone.
Along with my backpack. And all, yes all, of my backup disks.
Every single word I’d written during graduate school. Three and a half years worth of work. All gone.
Okay, well, I have some of it. Pieces of things backed up on my network drive at school. And I still had one disk with an older version of my master’s thesis. But all of the best stuff, all of my fiction, all of the work I’d done during the height of my productivity, while I was losing my apartment and sleeping on people’s sofas, and living out of a duffle bag, when I was feeling most alone, when the laptop and the words I could type into it were my only comfort, all of that was gone. Probably discarded by the bastard who took them, since all he wanted was a bag to carry away my computer. And he probably got very little for that.
I haven’t been able to regain that writing momentum. Partly because of work, partly because I’ve been struggling to get a foothold on things in my life for awhile now. Those are both just excuses. The other excuse is that every time I sit down to write, every time I put a pen to paper or my fingertips to keyboard, I face not only the blank page we all face but a hole where all the words I’ve already written, the words I’ve convinced myself were so brilliant I can never recreate them, have been sucked into nothingness.
So I’ve been really excited about posting here sort of regularly. Even if it’s trivial or silly. At least I’ve been writing something.
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