The Beginning of the End?

It happened last night. There I was, writing away on Old Sparky, my thirteen-year-old computer, when I hit the "save" button and Old Sparky emitted an odd groan. Sounded a bit like the cat tossing its cookies on the carpet (which happens almost daily at our house), only it wasn't the cat, it was something deep inside the hot, glowing synapses of Old Sparky.

Then it happened: when I reached down to remove my floppy disk (on which I had saved a copious amount of near-perfectly written material that will some day set me on easy street) the disk wouldn't budge. Didn't bother me at first. After all, I have hundreds of these disks, on which are saved dozens of books, essays, stories, memoirs, proposals, letters, poems and other writing, the likes of which I have no idea when or how it was all produced.

But the disk was stuck. So, I had to physically reach inside the guts of Old Sparky with a pair of children's scissors and remove the disk, much like a doctor might remove a dark-bloody tumor from the duodenum. My wife walks in while I am doing this and asks, "Are you trying to electrocute yourself?"

"No," I tell her, as the sparks leap from the scissors and blacken three of my fingernails. "I'm just writing."

"You need a new computer," she tells me. "You've earned it."

I remind her that I have yet to write anything that has made any money and that Old Sparky and I have been through fifteen books together and probably some six to seven million words. That's not bad for a hunk of junk that oozes ozone scent and often fades to black. I've tossed Old Sparky on the floor many times, performed mouth-to-mouth, and even repented of being a computer-beater, but the dear old machine always takes me back and keeps on giving.

"I'm not buying a new computer until this one dies, or until I write a book that actually earns money," I say. And I mean it. One way or another, even with scissors in hand, I'm going to keep this hunk of junk alive in 2009 as I write four more books.