Digital House Fire

I lost my hard drive on Saturday night. Fare thee well, Prism, fare thee well.

Having slowly but surely shed my reliance on technology, for the most part, my losses were minimal. I had backups on my thumb drive of a few pictures and five text files, which were the most important of my writings. Had I lost those, there would be much gnashing and wailing of teeth. The remainder of the lost information was just music, random pictures, random documents, and my out-of-date resume. They were the powdered milk, and can be reconstituted fairly easily. The thumb drive backups, those are the powdered water: just add water.

If you don't get it, don't worry. I don't either. It's been a long weekend.

For a few minutes, I felt like my house had burned down. The ratcheting and grinding from within my computer, the error message/Blue Screen of Death, that i was able to make it work for a little while by flipping the entire laptop on it's side, but not to the point where I could salvage the information. That was it. My digital life, gone not in a poof of smoke, but a burst gear.

It's silly, I know, the peculiar chill I felt, as I sat there, put my arms around myself, and wondered what I was going to do. Everyone I care about is OK. I had my health, and all my stuff was intact. I even had an old hard drive (which I re-christened Faith once I got it working in this laptop). All that was lost were ones and zeroes, and we all know how much I love numbers. And yet, somehow, like a prism, our lives have splintered; we possess so many facets to our lives now. Our online life. Our offline life. Our personal life. Our public life. Our family life. Our social life. Our leisure life. Our work life. Our sleep... You get the idea.

It isn't as if I lost my digital persona. But on some level, I lost the digital representation of myself. And the infamous cyber-luddite, much as he doesn't want to be defined with narrow concepts, cannot deny this part of himself. It hurts just enough that denial only makes it worse. And I'm not really changed by this. It took less than a day to get Faith up and running. But still.

Good gracious I'm tiring and rambly. Maybe when I can get some distance I'll discuss what else happened. Yes, and then I'll touch the light, as if it were a coherent item, tangible and frangible and audible and all sorts of other lies. Boy I need to sleep.