PANIC TIME!

My computer crashed last week. Talk about panic time! I couldn’t check my emails. Okay, calm down. Just sign into my blog, instead. Oops. Can’t do that, either. Edit my novel. Nope. So I sat frozen in front of a useless keyboard while the realization sank in. I was helpless. Emasculated. Rendered less than human by the failure of a piece of electronics.

A tragedy! Or is it? Perhaps it's a wake-up call. Get a life, Don! Wean yourself away from the computer. Go take a walk down in the Bosque. Skip a few stones in the Rio Grande. Check out the wildlife. Count the birds. Breathe some fresh air.

Air. Oh, yeah! There's plenty of that. The wind is blowing. It’s springtime in New Mexico, so the wind is really blowing. “Lean into it” blowing. And a cold snap has set in. Better start my new life some other way.

Go to a movie. Haven’t been to one in a while. Great. Wait. Nothing I want to see at the $2.00 theater, and nothing I’ll pay $8.00 for at the other houses.

Okay, read. I haven’t kept up with my reading properly. I pull out a James Lee Burke novel. He’s one of my favorites, so that’ll distract me for sure. But Dave Robicheaux and Creole Belle just couldn’t compete with my sense of loss. I’m off the internet, man! Disconnected from the Big World!

Oh, sure. I get news on the TV. But I can’t interact with it. What if some movie producer has sent an email desperately begging me to sell him the rights to The Zozobra Incident or The Bisti Business? What if a reader has attempted to get in touch through my blog, and I’m falling down on my promise to answer each and every contact? What if … what if … what if ….

Reality sets in. I'm a twentieth-century man caught in the twenty-first century. So I start my new life by running out and buying a new computer. Talk about pathetic!

Don

Next week: I’ll try to stop whining.

New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.