My laptop has endured a lot of hell. I don’t treat it as well as I should. There are scratches and smudge prints all across the screen. When the sun glares on it when I sit outside, I can’t see much of it. I have to move somewhere in the shade.

But I’m typing this in a coffee shop where it’s colder than a refrigerator. It’s windy in the desert, so it’s freezing outside at seven in the morning.

I’ve survived many laptops. Most of them were Windows computers that lasted no more than three years. They would get viruses for no reason, so I would have to replace them with the next janky Windows computer.

Then my dad suggested I just buy Apple products from there on out. I haven’t had one die except for that one time when I used the wrong screen cleaner, and it destroyed the screen to where I couldn’t see it anymore.

That led me to this machine, which I bought during COVID. It has stood the test of time.

I get post-traumatic stress when it comes to my laptop. I protect it as if it’s sacred because of one time when I went to feed my girlfriend’s cat in East Hollywood. It took me three hours to clean up what the cat had done to her apartment.

When I came back out, I discovered my laptop (a Windows) missing from my backseat. All of my work was on that machine — I believe it was a Dell. I’d never saved any of it to an external hard drive. All those years of hard work were in the hands of a thief.

I began to cry on the street adjacent to Paramount Studios, where I was hoping someday I would get to send my unsolicited screenplay only to have it thrown in the trash.

After crying, I drove to the Hollywood police station a few blocks away to do the only thing and report my missing laptop. The policeman blew the steam off his coffee.

“What do you want me to do about it?” he said.

“Go find it.”

“You got a slim-to-none chance, pal.”

I knew I did, but I was desperate and hysterical.

Needless to say, they never found the laptop. I don’t even think they looked. I filled out the police report anyway, but the time it took me to do so was a waste. The thief had probably already sold it by then.

What valuable lesson did I learn after that incident? Never leave my laptop unattended in the backseat of my car in East Hollywood — or anywhere, for that matter. Protect it as if it’s my child. I did neither. I trusted the world at the time, in my early thirties.

Now I’m hypervigilant. I’ll drive with the laptop in my backseat and constantly check to see if the bag is still there. If I don’t feel safe, I’ll move it to the front seat, as if a thief could’ve been hiding, took my laptop, and jumped out the window without me knowing. Or somehow, I’d absentmindedly left it at the coffee shop where I was driving back from.

And I’ll constantly stick my hands in the bag to make sure the laptop is there as if it had fallen out somewhere without my awareness.

It’s a brain disease, but that’s how much I value this laptop. I value many things in life, and more than half of them are objects: my laptop, my iPhone, my Xbox, my clothes, my Toyota, and my apartment. All of them are vulnerable to theft or damage.

I don’t know how much longer my laptop will last—maybe another year or so if I’m lucky—but it contains so much valuable stuff that I can’t stand to lose it or have it break down.

Anyway, like I said, it’s a cold morning in the desert. I have goosebumps on my arms. My fingertips are numb. I just devoured an egg and bacon sandwich on an English muffin, and I feel full afterward as I type away on this thing. I’m worried that the grease on my fingers will damage the keyboard. The keyboard is full of sand after typing in a sandstorm out here several weeks back. I’m afraid to clean it because I might use the wrong chemicals.

Then what?

It could break down.

At least my files are stored in a cloud somewhere, so I won’t have to worry about an external hard drive. Everything is stored in a cloud these days. Where are these clouds? Are clouds completely safe? I don’t believe they are. Nothing is safe.