The Silver Lining Around a Suicide Attempt

A couple of weeks ago Vanessa and I threw all of our junk into the back of a very large truck and worked our way across some desert, then a lot of farmland and finally some forest until we somehow ended up in Virginia in a new apartment. The trip went off (as they say) with nary a hitch. (As you might have guessed, the "they" I was referring to are, in fact, the Amish.) The point is - most of our stuff arrived roughly in the same condition that it left...with a few notable exceptions.

One difficulty we encountered was too much space in the truck. "Impossible!" you might say - but that's mostly because you're an idiot. Allow me to explain - I'll try to use small words so you can keep up. We got the biggest truck they had - a 26 footer. We only own about 16 feet worth of stuff. Our original idea was to set up the inside of the truck so it looked and felt just like our apartment - that way if we got homesick along the way we could just hang out in the back for a bit and then be on our way once again. Great idea, right? WRONG!

What seemed like a brilliant idea in the parking lot outside of our apartment turned into a disaster after about a minute and a half of driving over roads that are about as smooth as my rippling, washboard abs (for those not so well-versed in simile - that means the roads were NOT smooth). So for the first couple of days we would stop periodically, open the door to the back of the truck and marvel at how the truck had redecorated our truck-apartment. "Silly truck," we'd say "sofas aren't supposed to ride bicycles." I would invariably climb through the rubble, twine in hand to try to secure something to something else. At the end of the day, my efforts were about as effective as trying to hog-tie a dragon with sewing thread. Everything eventually went where it wanted.

Which brings me to the tragic loss we suffered when we arrived in Virginia. One of the last items packed up was our desktop computer. Rather than decide on a secure place, I decided to be true to its name and just put it right there on top of my desk...after all, it has those little rubber nubs to keep it from moving around. Why else would they put little rubber nubs on the bottom of a computer tower if not to keep it from shifting around on a desktop during a 3500 mile road trip? In retrospect, that may not have been the most sound reasoning.

In order to lull me into a false sense of security, the computer stayed in its assigned place for at least the first two days of the trip. Each time I'd enter the back of the truck to try to invoke some sense of order on the chaos, I would inevitably find the desktop sitting on top of the desk - innocently - with those little rubber nubs holding on like champs. It wasn't until I stopped making regular trips to the back of the truck to survey the damage that the computer decided to make its move. Somewhere between Kansas and Virginia, the computer decided to make its move and started making its way towards the edge of the desk.

Was it an accident or did the computer have a death wish? Maybe it just wanted to take a turn on the bicycle and never really meant to fall. But more likely than not there were some powerful inner conflicts that drove the computer over the proverbial (and literal) edge.

In situations like these, it's easy to play the blame game. Some might even point the finger at me and cite negligence in properly securing the desktop. I don't feel the need to defend myself - after all, my innocence is so stable and well-established that one might say it's sitting on rubber nubs...so instead I'll tell you who I think is to blame: Justin Bieber.

A few months before the move, I was shocked and saddened to learn the the computer had been downloading illegal music without my knowledge. For years it had downloaded songs - then listened after Vanessa and I were asleep. When I found out I was understandably furious and swore in my wrath that if I found one more illegally downloaded song on the computer I would take out its network card so it could never go online again. The computer did remarkably well and for months i didn't find a single illegal song...and then along came Justin Bieber.

I wasn't able to recover much in the aftermath...but the hard drive remained remarkably undamaged. When I pulled it and scanned its contents, i found a copy of Bieber's "Baby, Baby." I can only assume that unable to resist Bieber's cherubic voice, the computer reverted to its old ways and downloaded "My World 2.0." Then, rather than face the consequences of its actions, it decided to take a long walk off a short desk. If only that swoopy-haired kid's voice didn't sound like a choir of honey-soaked angels...I might still have a desktop today.

But every cloud has a silver-lining...and this one actually happens to be silver. I'm typing this blog entry on a brand new Macbook Pro that has replaced my poor, troubled desktop.