The Brain Expert
The brain expert came
when the buzzer stopped ringing.
I watched him pound
I watched him pound
my motherboard to dust,
hand-saw through my word-files,
chipping off lines
with a quick cold-chiseling,
with a quick cold-chiseling,
wipe the hard drive stark blank to a giggle-bite,
mechanically masticating
out
out
all the memory.
Safe now, he said.
Now no one
Safe now, he said.
Now no one
can steal
your identity
again.
~October 2013
55 bytes of the non-Apple for the g-man
Process notes: Most of you know I lost communications with my hard drive about ten days ago, and my old pc had to be put down, which resulted in me losing a great number of my poetry files. This may not seem scary enough for Halloween, but the process of getting rid of the old and on with the new, especially the abysmal Windows 8, was pretty terrifying for a Luddite like me.
My advice--BACK UP YOUR DATA!
HAPPY ALL HALLOWS TO ALL
and may you not be haunted by the ghosts of computers passed.
55 bytes of the non-Apple for the g-man
Process notes: Most of you know I lost communications with my hard drive about ten days ago, and my old pc had to be put down, which resulted in me losing a great number of my poetry files. This may not seem scary enough for Halloween, but the process of getting rid of the old and on with the new, especially the abysmal Windows 8, was pretty terrifying for a Luddite like me.
My advice--BACK UP YOUR DATA!
HAPPY ALL HALLOWS TO ALL
and may you not be haunted by the ghosts of computers passed.
Hover mouse for top image credit, or click to go to the photographer's flick'r page.
Shared under a creative commons license.
Bottom Image: Devil takes a Head, by Odilon Redon, Public domain, via wikipaintings.org
I just love the idea of a "brain expert." Especially one you summon with a buzzer! This is delightfully surreal, and makes me feel like there is a whole backstory here.
ReplyDeleteha. there have been computers i had that i would love to have hacked....with an axe...i lost part of a novel in a hard drive crash...it sucked!!!! love em hate em computers....
ReplyDeleteYikes! I especially like giggle-bite. I actually have been a victim of Identity theft and it was terrible. It happened from a plain old pickpocketing though -- nothing so fancy as computers.
ReplyDeleteThis is very clever and nightmarish enough - the self and the machine get pretty mixed=up especially as one's own memory is increasingly externalized. (Ugh.) k.
PS - love the motherboard here -- all kinds of echoes. k.
ReplyDeleteThanks, k. I loved your 55 as well, and the photo. You tapped into that isolated little crawlspace where the words hide nicely. Identity theft is no joke, of course--I had mine stolen from a receipt at a convenience store, and used to set up a porn site once. Fortunately, I didn't have an internet connection at the time, so I could prove it wasn't me.Still was a total hassle.
DeleteYikes. That must have been crazy!
DeleteRe files-I hope it is not too much of a block. Trying to recreate so etching can be especially irritating I find, I'm sure you will handle well though. K.
I came back to see what you were up to--I follow but get notifications very late-- and just noticed here the bites of the non-apple--very funny. k.
DeleteI know! Blogger's very blase about updates. Blogrolls don't update for up to twelve hours, subscriptions don't show up in the inbox, etc. Maybe the NSA has to vet them first. ;_) . I'm going to have to make a schedule for transcribing the notebook stuff--gah--which indeed will be not much fun to re-do, but also get psyched up for just the sheer volume of copy & paste on the published stuff. Since I've had such a minimal output lately, it shouldn't take too long to do it month by month, fortunately, and I have up till June on my thumb drive. Who would have though I'd be grateful for all the dry spells. ;_)
DeleteHope you're headed for a relaxing weekend, k, and some productive time for your projects.
This is completely terrifying to me. I have some backup but probably not complete. We always think it can never happen to us. I'm glad you got through it okay and I like those M words.
ReplyDeleteWhat am I gonna back up? Fifty or Sixty foot pics?
ReplyDeleteM'Lady, I really really LOVED your creative and totally understandable 55.
I so happy you are not incommunicado any longer.
Thanks for playing, thanks for the wonderful support you grace me with on Friday, and please have a Kick Ass Week-End
Laughin at your foot-thing. Always my pleasure to play, G.
DeleteThat's worse than a ghoul coming in through the door to me. Buy yourself a back-up drive and use it religiously. For about $120 you can get 1 TB (for about a million or so of your amazing poems). It sucks when you lose data. Completely. Happened to me once. These computers with their damned built-in obsolescence.
ReplyDeleteYes, really irritating Talon--considering the hard drive was *just* out of warranty, Shocking, I know. But I bought a new portable external drive today and am all set for automatic backups now, so hopefully I've learned something, anyway. Thanks for stopping by.
DeleteWe can't have anything lost of yours. I enjoyed the top photo as I have a love/hate relationship with computers (but so far my Mac has been faithful). Yup, I think this 55 is many peoples nightmare...
ReplyDeleteExpansion drives are useful not only for backing up your files, but also for keeping your main disc drive less cluttered and working better. (Seagate makes a nice 2 terabyte expansion drive for less than $100 - I store all my music, photos and videos on it)
ReplyDeleteThree times I read "buzzer" as "buzzard"... Really sorry for you loss (oh and I didn't really mean that to sound like a sympathy card message). What a nightmare!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I need a buzzard or two for the old pc. ;_) Thanks, Mary.
DeleteThis is definitely a horror story! Sorry to hear about your losses.
ReplyDeleteHow brilliant, Hedge! A hard-drive is an amazingly convenient tool until it crashes - For ages now I have stored all my docs on a flash-drive so my data is safe if the computer crashes.
ReplyDeleteWise lady--I had a thumb drive for back-ups, but had been very lazy about manually backing them up. I have learned all too well the fate of procrastinators now, though. ;_)
DeleteOh, I find this DEEPLY creepy, Hedge!
ReplyDeleteI loved giggle bite with masticating the memory but sorry you had to go through all that. Your take away is key- back up always!
ReplyDeletea nightmare for sure, and you bring a wry humor to it. The Brain Expert is really a perfect title. The question this leaves me with: memory-less, how do we remember who we thought we were?
ReplyDeleteThat's exactly the problem, Jane. The unblogged draft poems I lost were transcripts extrapolated from my handwritten note-beginnings, which I still have, but the transcriptionist changes every day, so I will never have exactly those same poems I lost. O well--we'll hope for improvements, right?
DeleteThere's no way to be safe from erasure. Such, it would seem, the will of the gods in the machine. It makes the care of one's work so much more superstitious, don't you think? Not that anything much survives oblivion anyway, but the dark seems so much more ... hungry ... with these mechanical soapboxes with their wired memories. But then, maybe we just learn humility a little earlier. It must have been gruesome to watch the saw go through your oak library.
ReplyDeleteYes, it was a bit on the gloomy side watching my hard drive hammered into trash--but obviously full of opportunity for metaphor. I'm the first to agree that technology is as good as magic for me, frightening, and a whole bunch of believing in things you don't understand, as the song goes. RE: hungry darkness-- you think the monks at Kells Abbey thought about that at all as they made their elaborate illuminations, with the Vikings howling and burning outside the doors, as it were? Yet here they are still, in the work of their hands and minds, so what's a hard drive or two compared to the written word itself in the long run. Thanks for reading, B.
DeleteNaturally I had to read each comment! Grandmother Mary and Grandmother Woonie (me) think a lot alike. Makes me very happy I use (pay for) weekly backup service through Mosy Home!
ReplyDeleteI have something now that will back me up as long as I keep it plugged in, so all is cool. Thanks, Helen.
DeleteYou seem to be taking the loss of your files very well. I lost a manuscript once and was in a daze for weeks, actually cried. Also important - back up your files in a format that you're most likely to be able to open a few years down the line.
ReplyDeleteWell, it would be far far worse without this blog, Mark, which ends up working like an automatic archive for most of my stuff. If the blog went down right now, though, yes, I would be crying, because it all would be gone.So sorry about having your manuscript ripped from you--you can never go back and write the smae thing twice, I don't think, and as I said in the poem before this, what goes down that hole is gone forever. (AFA formats, so far Word has been pretty reliable over time--we'll hope it continues.) Thanks for reading.
DeleteOh! Something like that happened with me as well. The Windows crashed and I lost all my files. It is horrifying enough because I was enraged throughout the day it happened.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting write. Giving a dose of horror to the incident, by way of your narration.
-HA
I wonder if that's how it will feel as wet memory begins to fade, like some invisible hand sawing out chunks of grey - only there's no backup possible. ~
ReplyDeleteEverything's transitory in meatspace, M--but oh how we hate to admit it.
DeleteYou have reminded me to get an external hard-drive and I am on the case now!
ReplyDelete