Mikarrhea

A lamentable display

I want to cry, I’m so devasted. I have to borrow Leigh’s computer just to blog. Every time I boot my iBook, the screen convulses in chromatic paroxysms, beautiful but stupendously traumatizing, like a couple of old girlfriends I could mention. That’s my second nightmarish laptop disaster in, like, six months. Why comes this to pass?

I’m lying prone in a bright, cramped room in Addison, Texas, accompanied by my beloved torturesses Mariann and Sabrina, just a nose away from at long last seeing every film ever inspired by the journalism of Susan Orlean. A while back, you may remember, I saw Adaptation--the other one. Now, we’re watching Blue Crush, the grrlpower surfer flick, with Kate Bosworth and Mika Boorem (two consonants away from Mika Cooper!). Rather, I’m watching the film and they’re listening to it while deftly manipulating electrothermolysis needles, jabbing and zapping my miserable butt till the cows come home--which in Addison is not a figure of speech but a more-or-less definite hour of the day that everyone acknowledges and that takes forever to arrive, not unlike like cocktail hour among our people. The dvd is in my iBook on the floor, which I plugged into the cheap TV set but a nose away from my face, a placement pernicious to the eyes but unavoidable, owing to the needle-death apparatus’s butt-proximity requirements.


The Badinerie from Bach’s Suite #2 tweedles obdurately from my purse, nipping at everyone’s concentration remorselessly. It won’t desist until Sabrina holsters her electric acicular goad, awkardly bends double, unzips the purse, retrieves my cell phone, and thrusts it in my face. Appeased, the phone instantly clams up. Leigh, it reads. I’ll return her call when I and my butt get our contractual break in a few minutes. I lob the phone vaguely pursewards. Or so I believe at the time. Instead, it nails the iBook smack in the caps lock. The surfgirls freeze.

Sabrina submits me the laptop for ministry. Getting it rebooted, getting Blue Crush up and on the waves again, refinding the moment of the crash, takes longer than we expect, what with me checking my email, scanning some blogs, and bringing up the film’s credits from IMdb (crucial to have open in a window behind the film as it plays, in case of disputes).

As I’m fiddling with the computer, I gradually become aware of occasional gentle bleeps floating on the air, as if R2D2 were snoring somewherein a corner. Sabrina & Mariann laugh. Butt poke . . . zap . . . bleep. “That’s me,” says Mariann. Butt poke . . . zap . . . bleep. “That’s me,” giggles Sabrina. I’m galvanized. Literally. It was actually kind of magical, like a science demonstration when you were little. My lovely tormentors were sending special ops zaps of electricity covertly rapelling into hair follicles in my butt, knocking out the extrusion generators there, then traveling up through my body, racing down my arms, escaping out my fingers, leaping into my iBook, transforming from zaps into bleeps and easing out the speakers, no one the wiser. Somehow or other I managed to get the movie playing on the TV again. But for the laptop’s display, it was the beginning of the end. Since then, it hasn’t gone two minutes without freezing and then psychedically chromatizing in that one-row-at-a-time recessional way they have that’s so demoralizing.

When I think of all the trouble I’ve taken always to ground myself to an outlet with one of those manacles with the alligator clips so as not to get any static electricity accidentally into the computer while installing chips and cards and whatnot! And here I was happily serving as the conduit for a whole brigade of active (if that’s the opposite of static) electricity! Well, whether I brained the computer when I threw the cell phone at it or fried it by inadvertently administering ECT (or perhaps it required the one-two punch), I don’t have a laptop for a while, and I’m probably not going to be posting as frequently as I was, until I do.