crash

Category: dribblings

My hard drive crashed. I didn’t panic because my husband, he is the Computer Whisperer. He can fix anything. He can save anything. I’ve seen him do it a million times.

But my hard drive? My hard drive crashed hard. I’ve lost everything. All of my music, my God, the music. I had a month’s worth of music. The iTunes. The podcasts.

All of my web favorites. All that shit I check on a regular basis? Gone. I mean, the web is still there, sure, but I don’t know where any of it is.

And the pictures. Over 13,000 photographs of dragonflies, birds, and Roxy (and some people). All of those fucking pictures.

Essays, stories, written things. All the Goddamn software. Gone, the lot of it.

It’s so weird because I’ve lost a billion things on that hard drive. But they’re all intangibles. When I think about all those files, I tear up, and I feel weird about that, because it seems like they should be meaningless, they only exist in this really small box inside a slightly larger box. They are things that no one else cares about. But they were my things. I made those things. And my nature photos? How many miles have I walked to get those? How many hours did I sit on the bank of the creek during the blazing hot summer to take all those pictures of the dragonflies?

I know it’s not even close to having your house burn down. But maybe it’s like if you had one room in your house, the room with all your pictures and what all else you have in your digital life, if that room burned down. Thankfully no one was hurt, you still have your clothes, guitar, camera. But there it is, one room, the room that probably best defined you, completely gone.

Yeah, it’s a postmodern problem, and it fucking sucks.

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