Yesterday was Computer Day.
My review copy of Adobe CS3 was in my hands and needed 5.9 GB of hard drive space. The only way to get that in and still have a nice big chunk of free space for faster running was to move some photos and dump applications I didn’t need. To make space to store the photos on my 160 GB external drive, I had to expand a disk partition. To expand the partion without erasing everything already there, I needed to be able to resize it on the fly. (To do that, I had Drive Genius, purchased just the week before.) But I first needed to shift the partition to another portion of the main hard drive, so there’d be free space underneath it. It was one of those times when everything you do is necessarily abstract. I spent the afternoon watching long blue progress bars march slowly across the screen.
Lampshade reflection voodoo on a rainy day
Very satisfying, though. I could hardly believe that the software, the MacBook, and the drive functioned so perfectly together and that I could really make this happen. It wasn’t long ago when there was no way to do these kinds of things, at least not that I had ever heard of.
I trashed and trashed and trashed. I mentally re-arranged my desk space while defragmenting all my volumes. Somewhere in the process, I tried some actual work. But everything I wanted to launch was an old version of what I needed to stall (the CS3 suite), and that grated on my priorities. Ever ready to slow down today for the chance to speed up tomorrow, I ran a bunch more disk utility programs until everything was clean and shiny, and then I went to bed (2:39 a.m.).
Today we went out to breakfast with a friend. The Taos Diner had a “Johnny’s Special,” so I had to get it: egg, chopped green chiles, cheddar cheese, and ham on an English muffin, served with nice crispy-crunchy almost-burned potatoes just the way I like them. Our friend talked about her new house that has a pass-through for firewood from the room where the wood stove sits. I felt more than fine and wondered if I’d be able to buy us another house when the old ladies in my family die. The sky was getting grayer and grayer as we ate, and when we took off from there to go buy fancy kitty kibble at the vet’s, it looked like it wanted to rain.
About an hour later, that’s exactly what it did, all afternoon long and into the night a little bit. Yes, it was cold. I had to build another fire in the wood store. But i did get all my software installed, this time watching green progress bars instead of blue. CS3 rocks on the Intel MacBook, my oh my.
Things seem almost normal, for some reason. I don’t know what “normal” is, of course, so this must actually mean that being crazy is okay.
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Reading this account I asked myself why it sounded so familiar. A guy totally engrossed in the work he knows best, operating at the top of his game, feels great joy just in being alive, has satisfying breakfast, all’s right with the world, for an instant of time (but there’s an intimation of angst somewhere in the past or on the horizon). Pardon my clumsy paraphrase, but that was how it hit me – very much the way Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” hit me long ago. Getting the details right in a sphere one can control is powerful medicine. It staves off personal despair and cosmic horror… or something like that.
I appreciate all that. It mostly only happens when I have no choice or stop resisting. If we could just be that way all the time, I’d never come down.