I think I may have reached an important milestone in working through my personal grief over my deceased computer.

My deceased computer, I might add, that is ONLY TWO YEARS AND FOUR MONTHS OLD and should not have died because nothing bad ever happened to it, unlike the time I killed another laptop computer by forgetting to zip its case, and so when I got up after writing for eight hours one afternoon and picked up the handle of the case, with more than a little bit of force (brought about by drinking many, many cups of very strong tea during those eight hours of writing), and the laptop went zinging across the floor of the coffee shop where I was writing, bouncing three or four times on the tile floor, with the battery hitting the wall—–and yes, that computer was dead, too, and had just demolished the entire manuscript of a book I was writing, but at least that time I understood why.

This time, there was just the Blue Screen of Death and an awful grinding noise, something like a death rattle.

Yes. It is true that it is still dead. I just went downstairs to my desk and turned it on for one last time, just to see, you know, if there was any way it might let me get a couple of old documents off of it, you see. If there could be some kind of electronic miracle, perhaps a tear in the fabric of the universe. Maybe I could get the essay I wrote about my sister after she died. Maybe some of my stories I wrote in the last two years for the newspaper I work for. Some of the letters my friend Diane wrote in emails to me, because she does write the funniest emails in the world.

I clicked the ON button, and it came merrily on, churning itself up to life.

It said:  ”SMART Failure Predicted on Hard Drive.”

Then it had the nerve to say:

“Please back up the contents of the hard drive and run”

I had to stare at this, blinking, for a moment. Back up the hard drive and run?!

This computer is kidding itself if it thinks we can still back up the hard drive.

Anyway, this is a catharsis moment for me. Tomorrow, having given up on it, I shall take the damn thing to Best Buy, where it is still under warranty, and they will wipe the hard drive clean, and return it to me, a brand spanking new computer that will not remember anything about its past.

In the meantime, I have actually done something tonight that I have meant to do since I started this blog: I have posted some actual PAGES. If you look on the right-hand column, you will see that I have typed in some columns I wrote a while back. They are from my book, “You Might As Well Laugh,” and I typed them in because–well, because my kids told me I should. They said blogs can get boring without more to look at!

Who knew?