Tag Archives: laptops

Fiction

Lost Forever.

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As a writer, have you ever lost your work forever? I’ve lost many drafts because of faulty computers. At one point, I was a Windows guy, going through them, destroying them—not the works, the computers. They were pieces of trash. Nothing against Bill Gates, but there was a reason why they cost so little and why Macbooks cost so much. I could buy a Windows computer for under five hundred dollars, and I did many times.

One day, at a coffee shop on Wilshire, I left my laptop—I think it was a Dell—sitting on a magnetic table where people could charge their phones. I was talking to a friend there. He’s not a friend anymore, not after what he said to me. We stood outside, smoking cigarettes next to my car, and he said, “Ben, you should give up being a writer. Find something else to do.”

I said to myself, “You’re over, pal. I don’t need you and your negative vibe in my way.” But I never told him. I just kept the anger inside and never went to see him again.

When I went back to my computer, the screen wouldn’t turn on. I pressed keys and kept pressing keys. The panic button in my nervous system had already been depressed. I kept jabbing away, but the screen wouldn’t turn back on.

“What’s wrong?” my shitty friend said.

I thought, “Shut up and get out of my way.”

The laptop made no sound and was completely dead. It was like the magnets in the table had somehow overpowered it.

I took the computer to the mall, where there was a Windows store, but they couldn’t help me. The people were useless. They stood around in their collared shirts and told the customers to wait all day to be helped. That or they flat-out ignored them. I was flat-out ignored, and my computer was dead.

They finally brought it to the back, where I guessed a computer laboratory existed, and I waited around for an hour for them to come back out with it. The lady in the collared shirt who was helping me returned with my dead laptop. She didn’t even tell me what was wrong with it. Instead, she began trying to upsell me for a more expensive computer.

All the work I’d saved on it was lost forever. That was my last Windows computer. After that, it was all Mac computers.

This was before the real advent of cloud services when I drained laptops. Now, I need to worry about losing any work as long as the cloud is synced up. But anyway, I lost several things that day: a friend and the last draft of my screenplay and novel. No wonder I’m writing about it. My heart still aches.

Non-fiction

Writing on a Laptop.

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It still feels funny to me, writing on this laptop. I write in longhand every morning, and it’s tiring tiring tiring. But that was how they used to do it back before the typewriter. It’s hard to imagine people used to write letters to each other rather than send text messages or emails.

I don’t know why it feels weird. It must be that it’s artificial. I can produce with a hand and a pen in a different sort of way. My thoughts are copied quicker on this machine than they are with a pen and paper, but that doesn’t make it better. It makes it lazier.

I copy my stories from longhand. The problem is I can’t read my own friggin’ handwriting. It’s as sloppy as spaghetti. My alphabetical letters look like squashed insects. Squashed black insects because of the black ink. I choose not to write with blue ink every morning when I journal.

Some people are opposed to journaling. I don’t understand them. How do they jump right out to writing without warming up? That would be like skipping stretching.

Journaling is hard work. I usually write the same crap every day, but I know better not to show it to anyone. No one would want to read it anyway. They would think, “My god, what is this person doing?” Or “Lock this person up.” Yes, some morbid thoughts intrude in the morning. They’re distracted as the day continues by worries such as my job. I would rather keep those thoughts and bottle them up for later, but they dissipate like dreams. Then I’m stuck with dull thoughts, like what shall I do later?

I’m reading a book. I’m always reading a book, except my ADHD doesn’t allow me to focus. The books I read are long, such as The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Damn, it’s long and dense. I have no idea what I’m reading.

But anyway, my laptop is a fountain of activity. I use everything for it, it seems, as it pertains to writing. But I can’t just dive into it without my stretches. I have to get loose, and this is one way of doing it. If only I could read my own handwriting, I could write a whole book that I copied by longhand.

But no. I have to do it the hard, unnatural way, and that’s by jamming these keys with these fingers and pressing ENTER every time I finish a thought. That’s right. I space it out like a weirdo and then go back and form these paragraphs to fit the prose together.

What’s the proper way to form a paragraph? Do I even know, or do I just make an attempt? I never diagram sentences. They never taught me how to do it. When I was in high school, they showed me how to outline, which was the worst thing they could’ve done. I’m terrible at outlining. A. Ab. Ab1 Ba1. How much more confusing can it get? I always skipped the process and dove right into the writing.

Of course, my mother would help. She showed me a short story I’d written in elementary school. It was obvious that she’d helped me. I didn’t have such a rich vocabulary when I was eight, but she swore I’d written it on my own. Yeah, right. But I guess I’ll take the credit.

Anyway, this laptop has saved a lot of time and effort. I just wish I was born in the age of the typewriter. It would’ve taught me much more discipline. I would’ve had to toss the page after a typo and start all over, not simply tap DELETE. Oh, well.