[Take 2. Take 1 pending moderation. To publish something, anything…]


How about this: I fired up my old G4 yesterday afternoon. It had been shut down during the recent electrical storm. One of the hard drives (the oldest) will not mount. Not only will it not mount, it is not recognized by the OS as being what it used to be: a hard drive full of stuff. (PDFs, audio files, midi files, photos, what have you – or now, don’t have you.) It is now a paperweight. Did I not shut it down soon enough? Flakey power grid? Or was it just due to expire? Some of that stuff on that drive, which goes back to 2006 or so when it last crashed – (I called it Phoenix in commemoration of that crash) – is backed up around here as cds. The audio projects usually are created for a reason. We want to listen to stuff, or our clients have requested stuff. Other things are surely lost. Who knows?

It is that Zen lesson of non-attachment. That lesson, we’ll admit, gets old. We learn it over and over again. Are we prepping for the crash of that hard drive between our ears? Mayhap. I’m tempted to let fly a bit of doggerel that parodies the poem “To a Dead Kitten.”

Apologies to Sarah Henderson Hay. [Apologies always useful. Our transgressions are legion.]


Pull the rug up off the floor,
unplug the power cord and say
whatever curses you adore,
for what was once a click away,
is not reporting anymore.

How many files did we just lose?
Which memory went out the door?
Which of those that we could choose
Is now a byte that won’t restore?
I cannot see what I have lost,
so no accounting of the cost
is sane, germane, or worth a thought;
Another hard drive must be bought.

Why did this thing go belly up?
Whence erased its little mind?
How can a thing now so corrupt
put us in such a sorry bind?
It’s just like this, I always say…
Back that thing up just twice a day,
You never know when it will die,
and leave you standing there to cry.

And that’s Beck’s Good Word, lite edition.