It’s been a bad morning.  It started last night. Yesterday I got food poisoning. Fortunately, no nausea, it has just felt like the flu, with fever and chills.

Then, my computer acted like it had gone to that great technology heaven in the sky… to forever cavort with all the discarded PDA’s and flip phones. Under great duress I tried to revive my dear friend until my teeth chattered with fever and I fell back  into the covers and dreamt of shiny new Mac Books. (Actually, I dreamt I was riding a broken bicycle down a dark and deserted country road…what does that mean?!)

So, early in the morning, I loaded up the invalid laptop, and headed to  Starbucks for some serious remedy. I got it to work…eventually. But I had to make some compromises. I had to run restore.

I lost a lot of stuff. The most important things,  like my novel, are still there.  But the software I originally wrote it in, is not…which means I lost a ton of previous versions and drafts, and a lot of poetry as well. But good news, that blurry uploaded snapshot where you can’t make out anything but my niece’s left foot,  is still there. Wouldn’t want to have lost that.

I have spent the morning backtracking trying to download different things I have that makes my computer…mine. It’s got me thinking about how much of me is on this machine.  The prose and verse of a life lived in LCD…read a poem I lost. I’ve had this computer for three years now, and it feels like…me.

My browser was comfortable and familiar, with all my bookmarks and buttons set to navigate through my digital life with ease .  My shortcuts were in perfect place, and I had the program tiles arranged exactly how I liked them. And now, it is all gone. Default. It’s the same computer, but not really.

I miss it. A life lived on LCD, displaced. I’m sure there’s some sort of poetic metaphor having to do with my nomadic lifestyle, but right now, I’m really much more interested in learning to back up. Or the secret backdoor to get back all my lost data.