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...