tap foot for bj

My devoted readers have been asking me why I haven't been writing more. The rumors that I've already run out of material are not true. The truth is, and we deal only with truth here at Awkward Backhair, that my computer decided to self destruct last Thursday or so. I remember getting home Wednesday, I think, fiddling briefly with a few things and then leaving my computer running, downloading, I think, the soundtrack to the original Transformers movie. I chose to do so mostly so that I could get that sweet song "The Touch" . Big mistake.

Looking back, my computer had been making some pretty angry noises for about a month before it decided to literally explode around Thursday at noon. I awoke to a bit of a frozen screen and figured a good old force quit should do the trick, but lo and behold, no dice. Given that, I went straight for the forcible reboot and headed out to see a doctor, something I like to do, on average, about once a week. When I got home, there it was, the Apple logo staring at me with a bizarre handprint surrounding it, like knuckles burned into the screen and, below it, a twirling grey meter that was not the cool color wheel I'm so fond of seeing whenever shit starts running slow and you get really pissed and access the force quit menu to see that, big fucking surprise, said application is "not responding." And that's when it happened, the bastard exploded. By that I mean I wish it had. Instead there has been a slower, more painful torture (which I was about to spell torcher) process whereby I tried to boot from the system disk to find my hard drive represented by a hard drive with a question mark above it. It reminded me of those "Got Milk?" ads, only instead of being a pretty sweet campaign promoting a beverage I love, it was a bit of punctuation telling me that my hard drive was probably fucked, period, incidentally another bit of punctuation. The next time I booted it, just moments ago actually, I got this sweet square with a mock three-dimensional representation of a globe representing North and South American. Oh, and it flashes.

I tried to think what I'm going to really miss on my computer since I think it's better to assume it's lost and experience great joy should it be saved. Right then, it boils down to about this: 1)e-mails: thousands. I send and receive a pretty good amount of e-mail, as do most of you out there. Sometimes it happens to be those really useful stock tips or awesome deals on prescription drugs or, when I'm really lucky, offers to get flipping wads of cash from Africa or a bride from Russia. Those are the e-mails I keep you know, the valuable ones. All the ones from family and friends I trash anyway, or at least I would if those people sent me e-mails, but we're speaking hypothetically here anyway since there is not a one-hundred percent guarantee that my computer is in the shitter yet; 2) some stuff I wrote: I've got some crappy stuff compiled that I like to read periodically just to remind myself what a dumbshit I am. If those works are lost, I'll have to rely on family and friends to tell me that; 3) photos: some people call them pictures. Who cares? Actually, I do, not about the distinction between a picture and a photograph, but about the five-hundred or more [insert choice between pics and photos] that I have from my time in Hawaii. On the bright side, without them it will be easier to forget how beautiful it was there and I will be less likely to want to go back.

Without my computer I decided I needed to go to Buffalo. Inevitably this meant returning home and, because it's a long car ride and I am me, it also meant at least one ride on the community poop train. Do not pass go. Do not collect two-hundred dollars. Tap foot for bj. As I sat there, wondering as usual why I had pooped clear jelly, comfortable on one of those disposable toilet seat covers that have the perforated middle that will hang in the water so that it's sucked in when flushing, those were the words staring me in the face. There was a moment of indecision. I heard a guy in the stall next to me. Do I tap my foot? Which foot? Paralyzed by my options, I started thinking about all the other times I had seen this scrawled in bathroom stalls. Not only could I not bring to mind their locations, I couldn't remember if I had ever tapped my foot. Just then a busload of Japanese tourists emptied into the restroom. Frantically I looked around for a similar instruction from the bj guru on initiating a lemon party. The next thing I knew I was standing in front of a sink, lamenting the warmth of the water, having missed out on opportunities for both a blumpkin and a lemon party.

But travel and the imminent loss of all of my [in]valuable computer data has made me sleepy. Tomorrow, if I find a computer to use, maybe we'll talk restaurant ideas and New York City milieus. I always thought Macs were sort of invincible. Newsflash: totally vincible.