Unplugged

I haven’t written any blog posts in over a month. I don’t know where I misplaced May. I think I put it out in the back yard and forgot about it. But now that it’s sprouted into a nice sunny June, I’m reminded to tend to my word garden, my little blog.

My main excuse for not posting is that T’s laptop died. My own laptop had suffered a slow death in February when my back crapped out. After so many hours on the computer, I guess my body had created a cybernetic link to my iBook.

And then I worked T’s Macbook until it too couldn’t take it anymore. Fortunately, replacing the hard disc drive of a Macbook is infinitely simpler than the brain surgery I had performed on her previous laptop.

Being without a computer at home was quite disconcerting. My dependence on the internet was never more apparent. Here were some of the “basic” life things I couldn’t do:

• Communicate with people through email, Skype and Facebook.
• Keep track of my finances.
• Get the most recent podcasts.
• Read the latest news. I had to wait a whole day for the newspaper to come out.
• Recharge my iPod.
• Update my blog.
• Do simple searches for anything I was curious about.
• Get maps for some places I had to be.
• Work on the PhD.

Instead, I reverted to a pre-millenial Wind. And the following activities increased.

• Read novels.
• Played guitar and sang.
• Wrote poetry.
• Scribbled a lot in my journal.
• Conversed more with my wife.
• Did a little sketching.
• Slept.

All in all, it took me just a few days to adjust to the internet withdrawal. And soon I was the Bohemian hippie artist that I used to be.

I’m back to being a cyborg now. Because that’s life in the Internet Age. But now I know that when civilization collapses, I can just unplug and I’d be just as happy with my guitar and a good book.