Housekeeping
Decades after leaving Indianapolis for good, Kurt Vonnegut still is struck by a thought every time he passes through his home town.
"Where's my bed?" he finds himself thinking.
I know the feeling. The past is persistent; it clings to us, grabs onto our ankles and hangs on for dear life as we muddle through this world. We're dragging the past with us every minute, and a lot of it has to do with our stuff.
I wonder where my cars went, and screwdrivers and a couple of shirts. What ever happened to that "Keep On Truckin'" poster, or the one with Racquel Welch? Surely I had more record albums than this, but where are they?
And where's my computer?
I bought a new one this week, partly out of necessity and partly just because I could, and now I wonder where the first one is. I bought it 14 years ago for $2500, a IBM clone (remember when we said that?) with a black-and-white monitor (there were no graphics to speak of anyway), that powerful 286 processor and a staggering 40 MB hard drive.
I kept it around for years. My kids learned on it; I imagine my daughter, 19 and in college, still remembers typing the names of executable files to start a program. What I'd give to run across that hard drive again and explore its contents.
Actually, I wouldn't give that much. Nostalgia only goes so far. But it was a workhorse, that first one.
Anyway. I've been busy transferring files and tweaking all week, and one of the byproducts of moving up in the technological world (I've bought lots of computers, but this is the first one for my personal use in seven years, my first in the GHz range) is that I can now blog from the comfort of my basement office, as opposed to going upstairs and signing up for computer time.
One of my first steps in loading the Radioland software and getting going was to delete everything I've written in the past six months. This lasted for about 12 minutes until I figured it out, but there's nothing quite like wiping out your blog to open the eyes a bit. Way better than caffeine.
I've added a blogroll at last, and I'm sure there'll be various java scripts I'll toss in and remove, and it's possible I'll post more often. I still have to come up with something interesting to say.
But if you run across something that vaguely resembles a computer, with a big box and a big keyboard, a 1200-baud modem installed and 1 meg of RAM just for emergencies, it might be mine. It was someone's, at least, and, as E-Bay has shown us time and time again, someone probably would like it back. Just for old times' sake.
11:42:36 AM 
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