Memory-less

The fine weather continues, six straight days now. Rain and fog and cold is only a memory.

For half of those sunny days I have been without memory, the peculiar shade of memory represented by the computer, that is. On Saturday morning the wretched beast refused to accept AC power, and I just got him back this afternoon, soldered port and new power cord smirking at me. It's ridiculous how much I'm dependent, even addicted, and I think he knows it.

It's not like I was cut off from the world. The phone, the radio, and TV all work. I could get a little Net fix on my old slow Blackberry. But no personal email, no websites, and no access to the rough drafts of the various pieces I'm writing. It should have been heaven. It wasn't.

Or I should say, it would have taken a long time before it was heaven. I wrote on paper (I probably should review the writing immediately, for its many indecipherable smears) and no cursor blinked, there was no temptation to look up a fact or the Dow. There was a hint of pleasurable unlinking from a machine. And doesn't ink on paper look so nice in the sun, not all glare-y with reflections and refractions and dark shadows and other temptations to bad writing? But I didn't have my notes, I didn't have drafts, I had no memory but what sat in my brain. It was a little alarming to have to re-create, extemporize, and eventually just give up and work on something new. Liberating, maybe and eventually.

One thing's for sure. If I had been deep into the soccer scores or the local news on Village Soup like I usually am at 7:00 in the morning, if I hadn't been sitting near the window reading Roxana Robinson's Cost (which is about addiction, by the way) and sipping coffee, I would not have seen the slight disturbance in my sideways vision, and then the bald eagle flapping majestically from the tall pine next door and crossing into our airspace right in front. What a thrill! What a memory! Thank you, H-P, for making me pixel-less this morning; I'm going to turn you off now, and think about rapture.