I was downloading Kindle for PC when the computer shit the bed. Two days earlier, I had downloaded updates from Sprint that ruined my phone. Now this. I was already a little freaked about getting a virus from going bareback for a week or two after the security expired. Instead of re-subscribing right away, I thought, fuck it, let’s live on the edge again, if only in this greatly watered-down way. How about some of that reckless youthful disregard for common sense that created your legend, huh? Just for old time’s sake.
Hell, I wasn’t going to be downloading midget lesbian porn from Romania. I was going to be a good cyber-citizen. I’d stick to WordPress, Facebook, and whatever links on those. Besides, I didn’t need to be paying some place to protect me from something I’m not even sure exists. Computer virus. Until I’ve actually seen one and gone camel toe-to-toe with one, it’s hard to believe it’s real. Sure, I have heard plenty of anecdotal accounts of it, but same with Big Foot and Chupacabra.
Frankly, I believed in Big Foot and Chupacabra more. Mostly because I wanted to.
I remember early on in my sobriety I was still living at my mom’s, and was getting re-aquainted with the computer in my room. I had just joined MySpace and was poking around. I wound up on some punk rock girl’s page and clicked on her pictures. Scenes of human gore started flashing on the screen, one after another, with bizarre sound-effects and crazy screaming sounds. One image in particular stands out. It looked like a close-up of a hemorrhoids operation. Anybody who knows how squeamish I am about seeing operation scenes will delight in knowing that shit went into my eyeballs. Fairly traumatizing enough, but it wasn’t over.
After the strobing gore accompanied by the Bedlam Cacophony Choir, the screen froze on an intricate collage of gay porn. Not just any gay porn, but some really esoteric stuff, featuring old men in their seventies. Very graphic. I don’t think I would have liked it even if I was gay. Then a loud voice over the speakers repeatedly announced, “Hey everybody! I’m looking at gay porn! Hey everybody! I’m looking at gay porn!” I couldn’t make it stop until I unplugged the computer. I’m sure my mom heard that from her bedroom. What an evil thing to do to someone, I thought. Well played, punk rock girl.
There was no lasting damage to the computer, but my psyche had some disturbing images burned into its retina. I didn’t count that as a virus. It was just another fucked up thing that happened to me, in an already intricate collage. It wasn’t something to drink over though. I shrugged it off.
So now, when the subscription expired, I figured eventually I’d subscribe to some security or look for a free computer condom download, some Trojan Horse Trojan…but only when it didn’t seem like too much of a fucking hassle. That might be never. Meanwhile, I wasn’t going to take any crazy risks, like clicking on some punk rock girl’s pictures on MySpace, or downloading stuff that says “Warning. Are you sure you want to be downloading this? File found to be potential virus threat.” Except when Dave dares me to.
I had an expired cert and an antiquated firewall, but I also had a good feeling. I was an intrepid adventurer paddling up a malarial river while drinking a local remedy through a human skull.
Man, I’ve been through some real shit in my life, what’s a computer virus going to do to me that I can’t handle? I would find out soon enough.
One night, I’m typing away and the letters start to place themselves randomly within the earlier text. What’s coming up on the screen looks like it was encoded with an Enigma machine. It would stop for a while, let me clean up the text, write some more, and then like a venereal wart resistant to Podophyllin, keep coming back. O h yuo ffffffffukcr! e
That kind of bullshit really slows down the creative process, but this little virus had even more things to demonstrate. It seemed to be showing off its newfound power and control over my computer. It started with random highlighting, then began repeating letters, and then spontaneous scrolling. It was replying when I didn’t ask it to, and leaving the page without my permission. Was this a virus, demonic possession, or just youthful rebellion?
Ghost cat across the keyboard?
There was only one thing to do in any case. Pretend it wasn’t happening. Just keep on keeping on. Smoke pouring out of the hood? Turn up the stereo and floor it. As a drunk, denial was an important survival tool, so it’s still my default go-to fix. My messages to Dave became something like, “Dud e, thsi thngi is doign some fcukde upshhhhhiiiiiiit to my keyb or !!!!”
Dave knew I caught a dose. He is Mr. Computer, but in a Mad Max way. Picture a dusty, road-worn, ex-con wearing wi-fi goggles, going giga-geek on a laptop duct-taped to his motorcycle’s sidecar.
His deeply held anarchist principles don’t allow him to pay for anything on the internet, so he deftly circumvents anything that smells like capitalist exploitation, which is pretty much anything that charges money. He recently put out an e-book, Subterranean Emerald City Blues, It’s a sharp slice of Seattle street life during the 90’s, that I highly recommend. A delightful piece of Misery Lit, or rather, Post-Misery Lit. Neo-Misery? Anyway, it’s as real as Dave, and that’s pretty fucking real. If you don’t want to pay the price you set yourself, you should contact him and he’ll be happy to teach you how to steal it. Knowing him, he would prefer that. Steal his book even though it doesn’t cost anything.
Anyway, he jumps into action. I need to download this and upload that. Run an EOD -13 driver optimizer through my Pre-Dat file digitizer. I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, and instantly get ice picks in the temples when I try to know. Let’s face it, I’m still a barbarian. A Russian soldier in some bombed-out Berlin apartment using the toilet as a water fountain. Tippy-tapping on a computer has only recently become a past-time.
Before that, my hobby was pulling the shower curtains down around me while falling into the bathtub pissing.
Anyway, I tried my best and did what I could, but it was too late. The little cyber spirochete had burrowed itself into my brain and was eating away at my motor skills. In the meantime, my screen was erupting in the wildest misbehavior. I was dealing with what Dr. Vernon Woolf would call “a self-organizing unit of intelligence.” A holodyne. This one, primary manifestation of intelligence that it might have been, was already an asshole and pissing me off. In a few billion years of evolution it would join a fraternity and drive a Corvette.
For now, it had to be content with irritating me like this. There was a mischievous quality to its hijinks, like it was really just running amok, not oblivious to the displeasure it was causing, but delighting in it. I’m sure I caught it from one of my motley mob of Facebook friends. Every one of them could easily have been a carrier. Scroll through them sometime. You’ll see.
The screen finally went turned onyx on Thursday night. All my attempts to revive it failed. By that I mean, I turned the router off and on a few times, and then unplugged the power strip twice. When that didn’t work, I said, “Fuck it.” It deserved to die. This was what Joseph Campbell would say represented the myth of the hero’s journey, only in this case, instead of retrieving The Golden Fleece, the hero fails, bites the curb, and dies all dead and shit.
Let the dead bury the dead. I had to move on.
Now what? I had a phone that had a touchscreen that kept freezing every 15 seconds. I could still make calls. I just couldn’t hang up…without taking the battery out. Forget about doing anything on the internet, unless it’s something that takes less than 14 seconds, like seeing how much e-mail you have to answer but can’t.
The cool thing was that it finally got me and Dave to talk on the phone. Before this we had only interacted via keyboard. Now that we were able to talk, we could really trade some stories. These were tales we held out because they were too involved to type in chat message, and too not-passed-the-statue-of-limitations to blog about. Dude’s got some good ones. Me too, I guess.
I broke out my paints and started splattering a canvas while we jawed. It was great. I laughed for hours, and wound up with sore abs and a masterpiece of abstract expressionism. Not a bad deal.
It would take days before I could get the computer back or a new phone from Sprint. I had to go Yukon and rough it. I could use this time away from suckling at a social media tit, and really take a look at things. Maybe even tidy up and reorder some life priorities. Of course, not without first experiencing withdrawal.
What if someone posts on my wall and I don’t “like” it soon enough? They’ll think I’m totally stuck-up and start talking shit about me to all the popular girls!
I actually did find myself feeling a little anxious. I had shit I wanted to do on the computer, and now couldn’t. I was trying to download Kindle for PC so I could read and review my friend, John Carnell’s book, Thugs Like Us. It’s a novel based on a true story of crime, drugs and drink set in late 70’s England. What’s not to love about shit like that? I wonder if I got the computer clap from it. It did come with a warning “This book does NOT contain any teenage vampires, dodgy S&M soft porn sequences, witches, dwarves, dragons or indeed any mythical characters whatsoever. This book does contain nuts.”
John being the main one. Dude is fucking crazy funny. Who else writes non-fiction novels?
Speaking of nuts, I was also in the middle of writing a story about spending Mardi Gras with some University of Michigan co-eds when the box went black. I had just gotten to the part where I had OD’d on brownies on a Greyhound bus in Texas. Shit. I was going to miss my deadline for the blogula, and I hated to do that. Sure, it was an arbitrary, self-imposed one, but forgetting that makes it still matter. There was also a pile of e-mail I needed to answer, some friend’s blogs I wanted to comment on, and a few reviews I wanted to write. Hard to thumb out on a phone that freezes every few seconds.
Well, all that stuff is going to have to wait now, isn’t it? I’ve learned to shift gears pretty quickly these days. Just another part of being sober. Things are going to happen, and some you’re just not going to dig. How you deal with them will determine a large part of whether you can avoid popping the beer can escape hatch. I have sober friends that can just go existential. Shit happens. It’s all meaningless. Nothing matters. Why stress? And I admire that.
I have to go a different route. I have to tell myself that everything that happens is for the best possible reason, regardless of how it appears to me initially. Whether I’m deluding myself is entirely unimportant. The cold hard fact is that when I do, my behavior improves. I respond in healthier ways, and it becomes easier for me to deal with shit in a more present, measured, and tolerant manner. If nothing else, I’m not aggravating my initial irritation with the bad repercussions from throwing a tantrum and broodfest. I also don’t get thirstier for anything stronger than a Hansen’s diet ginger ale.
The really strange thing is that, eventually, I begin to intuit/see/realize how whatever did happen was the best thing to happen. A new narrative emerges. I just had to stop being a petulant pissy-pants long enough to let it unfold.
This whole bullshit with the computer and phone, as pissed as I was when it happened, got me talking to Dave on the phone, spending more time with my girlfriend and cats, ruining perfectly good blank canvases again, cleaning and organizing my room, reading some history, pruning down my garden for Fall, staying longer at the gym, working on my jail house shadow boxing, mailing out some packages and post cards to friends, and basically, understanding that my life should be bigger than just the part that lives on the computer screen. I needed to be reminded of that.
It’s easy to forget real life happens out here, away from the screen. It’s easy to become a pasty, hunched little troll, growing too fat, lazy, and sheltered to participate in it. Tip-tap. Click. Click. Like. Share. Unfriend. Delete.
Unfortunately, when the real shit hits the fan, you’re not going to be able to click DELETE. You’ll be too busy trying not to get deleted yourself. Then you’ll wish you had logged off once in a while to jog around the block and work on your combos, or actually held a loved one, instead of “liking” Enterprise Car Rental and playing Slingo-Bingo for magic tokens.
Still, it was good to get the thing back from the shop, with my cat pictures intact.
Today, everything is fixed, but a little better because it was fucked before. The Hero’s Journey.
Well okay, I have an epic tale of drunken misadventure to finish, some friend’s work to read, and e-mail to answer. Then maybe throw some iron around to remember gravity still exists. BBeBBee Saef out threrrr ! e!!
Kick your computer to the curb. Your world won’t end.
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TRUDGING THROUGH THE FIRE 