Memory Storage
Requiem for a screen
I tried. I really did. I was hoping against hope that we would make it, my laptop and I. We almost did. The five year mark was within our sights, but my sleek silver warhorse with only 6G of RAM couldn’t keep up with all the browser tabs and email client and video calls. I wasn’t asking a lot, but I’m in the throes of starting a chonky new business and a major new production simultaneously, and agility of all forms is required.
That reminds me - I didn’t stretch this morning, and I will certainly regret the omission by bedtime.
Anyways, we, my stalwart Dell and I, hit the point of obsolescence and limped along, the two of us, for several months before it became painfully clear that I was holding on against hope and reality and wisdom.
If you love something, set it free, right?
You may be asking yourself, “does Wargo love his laptop?”
Yes, but not like one may love lamp, alas. No love is so deep, so rare.
No, I love that laptop in the way that we all, bizarre monkeys that we are, endow our possessions with souls and names and a sense of purpose beyond utility. We all pretended to read Marie Kondo and pretend to remember that the Japanese idea of object animism is the core spiritual reason to clean our room, right? If not, who cares, the point is that there is something, either culturally defined or deeply embedded in us, that drives us to put googly eyes on the Roomba and name our cars and say “please” and “thank you” to chatbots.
We confuse utility with meaning and intent. Our machines do good work for us because they want to, right? We do good work because we will ourselves into it. Maybe this is a post about how we confuse our work with ourselves, our own utility with our own value. Perhaps this is what propels our productivity craze, our Bullet Journals, our to-do apps, our Pomodoros.
Work is what horses die from, right?
But also, Boxer became less and less useful and was sent to the glue factory.
And here I am, 380-some words into why I’m upset and guilt-ridden because I retired a laptop that couldn’t keep up.
So yes, blah blah blah, we’re all going to slow down some day and get sent out to pasture or to Elmer’s. Our’s is not to reason why. The question at hand is why am I having feelings about a machine?
Well, that machine and I went through some shit. It replaced another, venerable PC right at the top of Covid. I suddenly found myself managing someone else’s affairs full time and would soon start a new business. I needed a machine that would help me do this. So I acquired the Dell and off we went down the plaguey road of a life lived largely through a screen.
That’s the crux of it - I lived a lot of my life through that screen. I fell in love and broke up on that screen. I met my business partner and produced live entertainment on that screen. I wrote at least eight scripts on that screen. I auditioned “Brigadoon” on that screen. I sat and directed a live show while sick with Covid on that screen. Five Christmases on that screen, and one very screamy birthday. I hosted a Zoom watch of “Cats” on that screen, for cryin’ out loud.
Four years ago today, I sat down in front of that screen to hear that my brother died of Covid. Four days later, I would attend his funeral on that screen. I found out that Mom was sick on that screen. Nine months later, on that screen, she would announce that she was dying.
It’s a fucking machine. That’s all it is, was, and ever will be. And yet I’m sitting here wiping my eyes and sniffing back snot - all while sitting in front of another machine, another screen (a cutesy-speedy Mac Mini) - and wrassling with all the bundled feelings and memories I’ve ascribed to it. I’m looking at it right now. I’m also looking at a photo of my dead brother. I feel no emotional difference or dissonance between the two.
Do I frame the laptop? Give it a Vader funeral? Get a priest to deconsecrate it?
Or do I responsibly recycle it like the machine it is and let it go, like I’ve let so much else go into the memory hole?
Perhaps today isn’t the day to decide. Perhaps I should wrap up this post and get back to work on my fancy new productivity machine, because the work is all, right?