11 September post facto.

The bench looking out 
onto the desolate intersection.
 
Yesternight was a sad one, But alas, there are some life lessons embedded within any struggle.  You could say I saw it coming: those are the worst.  After spending an hour and a half reflecting and writing on the Eleventh of September and other matters pertinent to my post -I lost it all.

Scene 1: I am sitting in my tableless apartment, upon a wooden stool at the counter.  My internet connection ceases.  It doesn't matter, at this point, that my computer plods along at a slow clip -all I need to do is finish my blog and post it.  Time: 10:30.  No problem though because when you live in a mountain resort town, hot signals move through the downtown streets like a child skittering across pavement on a hot day.  Hotter than street lamps; more solid than the posts they dangle from.
  
Scene 2:  Walking downtown -only to the outskirts,  I sit down on a bench that overlooks a deserted intersection: one man bikes by, a blinking light strapped to his head.   An over sized jeep speeds to a stop, continues through the intersection, travels down to the next adjacent road, turns around, and comes back through the intersection; the charioteer, obviously a man of purpose.  I hear a couple yelling in the distance, the doppler in full effect.  I can't make out the words.

And as they move further away, the amplitude of the sound waves increases with each pedal stroke; I beg them to come back (or at least within earshot) so that I may determine the upshot of this dispute.  Moreover, I have yet to determine the instigator but I assume that because the girl's voice is the more demanding of the two, it was the boyfriend who overstepped the boundaries of flirtation.

But he matches her hollers with a conviction found only among the desperate, resentful, angry, scared, and alas, those who wade in the rivers of righteousness.  And as both voices jostle back and forth, to and fro, I am left to conclude, because of the equal amount of yammers, that this joust will end in a stalemate, which saddens me because my jurisdiction remains unemployed; my purpose untapped; my facebook friends, untagged. 

But back to my own story of woes -you probably came here to hear mine and not someone else's and it is inconsiderate of me not to take this into consideration.

My computer is now moving slower than before -I try to close the browsers but this itself happens at a lethargic rate.  Frustrated -who wouldn't be -I decide to shutdown my computer via the off button, risky business.  My first thought is the irony and possibility that the blog site may not save my words and then bereft of my work, I will be left with a tinnitus encircling the cochlea of my ear, cheerily chiming out the question, 'was it worth it after all?'  So with such premonitions, I copy and paste my work to the text editor and save it.  And then, with utmost uncertainty, I press that circular, looming button at the top right hand of my keyboard and hold it down for the greater side of five seconds.  Everything goes comfortably numb.  I restart my computer and open up the blogger and go to the edited posts section.  Nothing.  I become uncomfortably numb.  Well that's alright because I had the foresight to save it as a document.  I open up the text editor and complacently slide my mouse over the file menu and scroll down to "open recent" where I find that the most recent of all articles was penned three days ago.  Macintosh's spotlight search fails me as well.

It wasn't the existential despair of times previous.  Sure... there was a bitterness at the world, but the bitterness was almost as subtle as the lessons I astutely assimilate.  And maybe it was because I knew (by the counter at the bottom of the page) that I had very few people to report to, and none of it involved prostrating as one would be inclined to do in circumstances with a professor.  Maybe I just felt more in control -my sense of worth not dependent on an ominously large figure, adorned with a white coiffure, tufts of gray sprouting from the sides of his head (I can hear the reverberations of my father's voice now, "that's not respectful," and its not, but the mind is not always respectful).  Or maybe with time, the ignorance wanes into wisdom.

And now, in gratitude for your ears, I will gift to you the lessons that I've engulfed -lessons so subtle that they would've been overlooked by the weak-minded and foible-spirited:
1.  Even after you think you have practiced patience; by Job, god is testing you and you better be willing to stake out all night -your bum numbing against the frigid, wooden planks -or your works will be sacrificed.
2.  Don't save you work to an unpredictable text editor that is thrown into the installation package at the last minute; at the very least back up your back up.  Back up that back up.  If we have learned anything it is that you can never take it too far.
3.  If your work is lost and you know it, stomp your feet but don't throw your computer on the ground because you will regret it -I don't know this from experience but because I had the foretaste to know that this would not behoove me and I had the control to carry this out.  I can tell you, having gained aftertaste from this experience,  I made the preferable decision.

 Scene 3: I go home.  Turn off my computer and for some reason, I think that if I turn it off and then turn it back on again, the piece of shit text editor will suddenly remember this document and present it to me .  As if my credulity isn't already at its max, I retrace my steps back to my blogging slate and find not even a title that remains to tantalize me.  All has been burned up, shredded into shambles, smithereens showering the blogosphere.  Golly gee. 

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Obviously September Eleventh needs to be discussed, it will probably take place on Sunday; which coincidentally, was also the day I had planned to make up Foreign Friday.  Foreign Friday will occur on most Fridays and I will cook a foreign meal of some sort.  Although I am wont to admit there is a slight possibility that somewhere in the ruminations of my mind this idea arose at least in half because of the movie I watched only a week ago, Julie and Julia.  Bon Appetite.

No word of the day for yesterday (because today is yesterday and today's blog - an important one -will take place later on today.  Brace yourself.

Jimmy