Happy Thanksgiving.  Box still gone.  What can I say, the magician is an artiste.  Miracles happen overnight, but repairs take longer. 

Hi.  I been gone. 

I punched the keyboard of my miscreant computer Monday night and shorted out the motherboard.  I've done similar violent things to the 'cheap peripherals' in the past (i.e.: the keyboard and the mouse) without any damage extending into the mystical tower.  This time it fried a chip; not anything significant like the main processer, or a video chip or hard-drive controller chip, just a keyboard controller chip on the M-board, but this PC won't boot without a keyboard.  Sometimes the insignificant is essential.

Everything is gone.  E-mail, instant messaging, posting to this page (I am doing this from another location out of my cave), is unavailable to me, and my favorite text-editor, NoteTab, is gone right along with my least favorite word processor, MSWord.  Gone even (or most especially, maybe) is all access to my computer's contents.  It's all still there, but I can't get it.  Like a child with autism, or an elder with expressive aphasia, my computer has it all and can't let it out.  I can rescue it by moving the hard-drives, but to where?  Someday to another machine, when I become solvent again (I will be stroked-out by then).  However, I would prefer that the magician -- who lives in an improbable little rural hamlet near Worcester, whom I have called, who seems to have some hope for rehabilitating the precious machine which carried me on this journey to these fond places here on the 'net -- I would prefer that he return to me the place where I have learned to live, the place where I have learned to be alive.  To the place where I am briefly now, at a usurped machine in a dark vacant office at work.  It feels like getting a fix in an alley.

Maybe being alive is something else entirely from what I have been doing here.

I hope to be back soon...

This fucking DSL sucks out-loud.  Came up at 3 AM, went down at 2:30 PM (half hour ago), and I'm asleep during 90% of that time period. 

How can I bitch?  It is -- as you are no doubt sick of hearing -- free.  But I bitch because it means I have to do the laundry.  Having no DSL means I have to shower, get dressed, maybe even clean the house.  Without the distraction of this wide area network distributed toy I have to confront the same fear I see in people who come to detox.  It is a very real terror, though of nothing, and it lurks just beneath the surface -- a howling, shrieking torment completely contained within its victim, while outside, in unrelentingly ordered moments, we all step evenly through the procession of a world which, though we search it for acknowledgement, is ignorant of the storm.  It is an apparently irreconcilable duality; the interior experience, ineffably tangible, irrefutably horriffic, and the exterior world, unaffected, irrelevant, and intractably enigmatic. 

So I bitch.  And I write about bitching.  I discuss this 'duality' as if there really were two things, and not merely the appearance of two things.  We have all experienced the excision of pain from reality; we have observed with objectivity when others have done it in denial of their own pain.  We have perhaps done it ourselves.  And we might have witnessed in horror others who cut our pain brutally from the fabric of reality, as if that changed it any.  "Let them eat cake.".  It is always flippant and cavalier.  It is always self-centered since it always costs the other more when we discard their agony simply because we do not like the look of it -- maybe because it reminds us of our own. 

The adults did it when I was two and a half years old.  I cannot speak for them, but from my perspective it appeared they did not want to deal with the intractable problem of an uncle who raped his nephew.  Besides, two-and-a-half year olds are resislient; they can recover from just about anything.  Right? 

Did I?

I'm trying to make it load faster, but you know how I am with the principle of keep it complicated, stupid.  I shaved off about 5% of its load time so far, but there is just so much stuff that needs to be crammed in...  And did she use the adjective 'interesting' in connection (indirectly) with me?  Omigod.  More javascript, I need more javascript, quick. 

The story is stunningly brutal and cruel.  Don't read it.  Do anything else, but do not read it.  Because once you read it, you will be completely preoccupied trying to convince yourself it is not true. 

Yay!  I can pay my rent!  Such are the turning points in my life.  But, you know, I think of war refugees, who are poorer than dirt, and homeless -- and hungry, always hungry (never sick, because if they get sick they just die) -- and then I think of how much money I give my landlord and I want to kill him.  (Oop.  That's not what I meant to say.).  I meant to say that then I think how fortunate I really am. 

Of course I could not find out anything about my bank account until my DSL came back on a couple hours ago.  It was off all day.  That's because I had today off from work.  (My DSL knows...  It watches me... it waits...  It will be up and running fine all day tomorrow, while I'm at work.). 

But -- I must have some sort of DSL-guilt, I keep talking about this -- it is free.  And it's even faster now.  It's latency is down to 30ms from 50ms.  It used to graph flat at 50, with occasional spikes.  Now it graphs flat at 30, no spikes.  Flat.  Things just keep getting better, life is good, there's no sand in my food, I think I still have a job, and we just enjoyed the first ocurrence of a blue moon on halloween since 1955.  Come on al Qaeda, nuke me!  Nuke me now, because right now I'm content.  But hurry because I'll be securely ensconced in my impregnable misery in no time.