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Requiem for a Motherboard

Well, hey there, chicks and chickers. I hope you folks are having a fun and fuzzy weekend, just like me.

(Or maybe I should have said, ‘just like mine‘ — I wouldn’t want you folks to get the idea that I, myself, am ‘fun and fuzzy‘. By no means.

For one thing, I shave, on a fairly regular basis. And for another… um, yeeeeeah. Let’s just leave it at the one thing, shall we? I’m thinking that might already be one too many. Let’s move on.)

Anyhoo, I’m in a far better mood than I have any right to be right now. I can’t say why, really. Frankly, for a long weekend, this one’s shaping up to be a bit of an ass-sucker. Just a bit. Of the ass sucking. A tad.

First of all, I finally figured out that there’s nothing I can do for my damned downed computer. I’ve tested, I’ve fiddled, I’ve begged — I even French-kissed the hard drives and promised them more, but I’m getting nowhere. I think they’re dead. Or just ignoring me — that shit never works on the bus driver when I’m trying to ride for free, either. Maybe I’m not using my tongue right. I dunno.

On what should have been the ‘good side’, the missus and I took a trip to Fenway Park today to watch a Sox game. And that was cool, I guess. The boys in the crimson hose fell behind early, and fell behind lots, and stayed behind until the end. And then, when all the innings were used up, the umpires said they lost. Damn.

(And you know — just as an aside to you baseball fans in the hizzouse — it really should have never been as close as it ended up being. The final was 8-6, but most of those Sox runs came in the seventh, and had no business scoring.

First of all, Jeff Nelson (ex-Yankee; big booooooos when he came in the game) walked three guys in a row — the number eight, nine, and one hitters. That’s just crazy — you can’t expect major-league pitchers to bail you out like that.

And then — then! — Mark Bellhorn comes up. And a new pitcher comes in — Ron Mahay, I think it was. Now, think about the situation. Right then, Boston’s down 8-1. The bases are loaded full of guys who Nelson just walked before slinking off to the showers. Mahay comes in and goes to a 2-0 count on Bellhorn. Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz — huge, hulking, Dr. Jeckyl-sized sluggers — are coming up next. So what would any sane hitter — or manager — do in that situation? Number two hitter up, with a 2-0 count, down seven runs where a grounder on the infield could end the rally? What do you do there?

I’ll tell you what you do — you take. Take a pitch. Make the new guy throw a strike. Just one. Just take a pitch. You’re sitting 2-0; once you get a strike, you can go flailing away like a holy roller on freaky ‘shrooms. But you simply don’t swing the bat in that situation. You just don’t.

Well, he did. And, of course… smacked a grand slam. I suppose that’s the beauty of baseball — three ass-headed walks and one ill-advised swing, and four runs pile up. And if I weren’t a Red Sox fan — with Bellhorn on my fantasy team, I might add — I’d probably shake my head in disgust at the whole thing.

Instead, I’ll shake it sadly, because even with those ‘freebie’ runs, the Sox still couldn’t pull out the win. And thus ends my time at Fenway this year, assuming no comp tickets find their way into my grubby little hands in the next month.)

Okay, where the hell was I, anyway?

Something or other about the weekend, wasn’t it? I think there was some sort of vague bitching involved.

Anyway, it looks like my three-day Labor Day extravaganza is getting a big fat speed bump in the middle of it — I’ll probably spend a few hours in the office tomorrow, killing a large part of Sunday getting through all the shit that I meant to finish on Friday. So this week, my Sunday will be like a Friday, though the holiday on Monday will still be like a Sunday. Which means Tuesday will be like a Monday, and Friday was really kind of a Thursday, and that makes today… um, well, I dunno. I suppose it’s mainly a Saturday, with a touch of Sunday, and just a pinch of Thursday or Friday in there. These three-day weekends really throw my calendar off.

I miss my fried computer, though.

(Hah! I’m back on track! Suck that, assbadgers who think I can’t stay on topic. Yeah, baby!)

It’s not so much the standup clips I pine for — those are still on the digicam tapes, somewhere, and it wouldn’t be that hard to copy them again, assuming I had a working drive at all. What’s more upsetting is the enormous volume of MP3s (almost all legal, even) and the video games (nearly all illegal, except the ones I actually play, ironically enough) that I’m missing.

Over a period of months, or maybe years, I’ve ripped just about all of our two or three hundred CDs, and they’re all sitting on that damned dead disk. Not to mention the custom-drafted football and baseball teams that I spent hours upon hours working on, poring over stats, making trades, working out the team strengths and weaknesses… it’s all just gone now, and I’ve got nothing to show for all that work I did on a bunch of pointless, private, irrelevant projects. Hell, nobody but me ever cared who I used as my backup middle infielder in High Heat 2003 (though, for the record and the sake of synchronicity, it just happened to be the aforementioned… Mark Bellhorn), and now — well, now it’s just a bunch of randomized electrons bumping into each other on a useless bit of metal that’s more paperweight than database. Bitches.

You know, if I weren’t jonesing so bad for a game right now, this disk failure might put trivial matters like video games and fantasy sports into perspective. As it is, I just want to download the new updated September rosters, and waste another few dozen hours getting back to the title game. It’s just the way I’m wired, I guess. I obsess. It’s what I do. And no amount of banging my head on the desk is gonna change that. Apparently. Ow.

So, I’m gonna look into taking my computer to a pro.

(No, no — not a hooker. A repair shop. I can’t see any reason to take my CPU to a lady of the night. Frankly, if there’s gonna be some sleazy chick ‘wiring up a hard drive’ or ‘downloading from a floppy’, or even ‘jacking into a printer port’, then we are not going to be talking about computers. We gonna be in full euphemism mode, you know what I’m saying?_

But back to my crippled computer. It needs help, and I’m gonna take one last, desperate stab to cure it. I’m finally — after futzing and diddling and tinkering in there myself — finally ready to admit defeat, and pay someone to tell me that I need a new computer, on the off chance that they’ll be able to save something from the original drives, and save me some amount of work getting back to where I was. I don’t hold out much hope, but short of some sort of shamanic ritual, or sacrificing a goat to the gods of the the ergonomic keyboard, I don’t know what the hell else to do. So I’ll put my money where my technical ineptitude is, and see if there’s someone out there who’ll take my money and return my video clips and digital songs and, yes, my finely-tuned rosters.

I’ll keep you posted — assuming I can’t find something more exciting to write about, like office paperwork, or peeling paint, or maybe navel lint. In the meantime, if tomorrow’s gonna be another workday, then I’m getting the hell outta here, so I can enjoy the rest of the night. This might be the only weekend I get, dammit. I’m gonna milk the mother for all it’s worth. Happy days, people. Happy days.