not falling down

1. Your package has finally arrived. Open it. It is a refurbished MacBook!
2. Boot it up to see if it works. It does! Have Maria show you neat tricks in OS X.
3. Snip open the mylar packets of RAM and new hard drive that you bought to make this thing more than a toy. Crack the case and immediately fall prey to the bitch hell middle screw of death.
4. Break Maria’s screwdriver trying to get it out. Yes, the screwdriver. Don’t even scratch the screw.
5. Become very irritable and take it out on the dog. Buy more screwdrivers and, in a fit of bad decision-making, WD-40.
6. Screw will suddenly decide to pop out about six hours later. Replace hard drive and RAM. Upgrade mood.
7. Reinstall OS X. Install Boot Camp. Try to set up partition for Windows.
8. You have erased OS X! GOTO 7
9. Obtain Microsoft Windows™ XP Professional patented encrypto-mathic secure Protectivation Key™ by advanced method of asking a couple dudes.
10. Install Windows. Accompany Maria to hospital (she is working; note that in current state of health she should possibly be a resident). Find Wifi. Post.
11. Profit!

There is a package coming to me. I live in Louisville. Where the big UPS hub is.

Somebody sold you a bad algorithm, UPS.

Update 10.25.2006 0057 hrs:

My dignity, like a bottle of Gauthier ‘88, shatters on the prow of Alison’s new blog.

I have whiplash now! Great! Dammit! This is from about eight seconds of headbanging during “Blister in the Sun” at Erin and Stephen’s wedding. I used to be able to dance like that for hours, and now my limit is less than eight seconds.

I guess having ruined my spinal column in college is worth some cred. Maybe.

Who the fuck sent me the creepy email with the talking monkey?

Update 2307 hrs: Ken did.

Stephen and Erin got married! To each other! Stephen’s pastor talked about his webcomic in his toast! Stephen wins. (And now has to hope none of his grandparents remember to search for it.)

Erin Polgreen, we failed to intersect at brunch! Email me?

“I walk with you, please,” he says, drawing even with her and smiling, as if delighted to offer her this favor. “My name is Voytek Biroshak.”

“Call me Ishmael,” she says, walking on.

“A girl’s name?” Eager and doglike beside her. Some species of weird nerd innocence that somehow she accepts.

“No. It’s Cayce.”

“Case?”

The standard criticism of William Gibson is that he’s spent twenty years writing the same story. Fair enough. But now I’m finally getting around to Pattern Recognition and remembering that I don’t care; the reason I go back to his books is their startling immunity to scansion.

I imitate the voices of a number of writers, particularly Margaret Atwood, Douglas Adams, Ellen Raskin, Rebecca Borgstrom and Neil Gaiman. I can get away with it most of the time (well, maybe not Borgstrom), but at a higher level, the whole desire to write microfiction is an attempt to shadow Gibson. I try to achieve, for a hundred words, the density he maintains for hundreds of pages.

That story Gibson keeps writing–the one about transcendence through technology–usually fails the Zafris test: its climax involves some nebulous achievement on a computer. Even if it is stereotypical, though, he always avoids making it trite. Orwell said never to use things in ways you’ve seen before. Gibson, appropriately, always finds his own uses for things.

Remember that one scene in High Fidelity where John Cusack leans over to Moby and says “I will now sell five copies of The Three EPs by The Beta Band?” And then he plays “Dry the Rain” over the PA, and he’s right. Then you go out after the movie is over and buy The Three EPs yourself, and it turns out that “Dry the Rain” is the only good song so you sell it to a guy named Leslie?

I hate that.

I will now sell five copies of Annasthesia by The Cinematic Underground, the same guys who did the score for this one movie I liked. I will do it by directing you to click the “hi” link next to the song “My Dear Self.” You can listen to the whole album that way, if you like, in which case you’ll quickly find it’s not the only good song. Just the best.

Think of somebody you knew briefly, for a week or two, maybe one night, maybe a month: a camp counselor or a host sister, a bad date or that guy who dropped out before midterms. Think of somebody you owe.

You’ve got one afternoon and one present, no larger than a garment box, to give this person. You have a table at a restaurant anywhere (except Paris) in the world.

Where do you eat lunch? What’s in the box?