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I woke up early this morning, dear friends.  Lately, writing sessions Chez PTMYB consist of sitting quietly for an hour, which turns into two, which turns into nearly three before the words come, but they're never quite the right words these days, and I go to bed feeling unsatisfied and vaguely grumpy at the distance between the words I wanted to put on the page and the words that actually arrived there.  Maybe if I get up early in the morning, I said to myself.  My mind will be clear, the air will be quiet, I'll spend the rest of the day with that nice sense of accomplishment that comes from getting the right words out.  It was in this frame of mind that I sat down at 5:45 this morning, thinking about almonds.

I will not go meticulously through the events that occurred over the following four hours, not only because they don't make for good reading, but also because I have tortured Lloyd and three of my closest friends with this story, and it never gets less maddening in the retelling.  The condensed version features my little subnotebook laptop, the one I called "the James Bond computer" when I bought it in 2003, suddenly exhibiting ominous signs of misbehavior.  It took an hour of booting, disk checking and rebooting before my own computer recognized my own user profile.  I agreed with Lloyd that it was long past time for me to back my data files up, and back them up I did, but not before another hour of watching the disk drive whirr to a stop less than five minutes before the files finished writing to the disk.  By the end of the morning, I was no longer dreaming of almonds.  I was dreaming of firing ranges.

Eventually I left the house and went to work, muttering to myself all the way about how close I came to losing all my files, about my piece-of-shit laptop, about why I was such a feckless, aging-adolescent dunderhead.  I thought about how fervently I'd hoped -- still hope, really -- that I could get one more year out of this laptop.  I wondered if I would have to start selling paradise jelly and damson butter, and just how much jelly I'd have to sell to buy a new laptop.  I thought about how I wouldn't be able to go to the gym because I'd have to work through lunch for coming in late.  I thought about everything I had let go unwritten over the past three months.  I wished I had never got out of bed.

When I arrived at the office, I turned on my desktop and reflected, mirthlessly, that I was in the presence of a miracle: a computer that didn't take half a morning to boot up.  Within an hour, I received my morning howdy from Snow, whose morning howdies are such an integral part of my having a good day at LuthorCorp that I can't remember what it felt like to start the day without them.  Snow takes good care of her friends, all of us, and this morning, after checking to make sure I was no longer in laptop-fueled rage, told me that there was news from Mir.

Dear friends, I love Mir.  I don't tell her this nearly enough, and I don't visit her blog nearly enough, which is just plain wrong of me.  Mir is a gorgeous soul and a gimlet-precise writer.  In a perfect world, Mir would be making money hand over fist from her writing while more famous and less talented writers (who I will not name here) would be steaming sliders at White Castle for a living.  She and her kids deserve the best things the universe can offer them.

Note to the universe: What the hell are you thinking?

Thankfully, Mir and her kids are okay -- okay being a relative term, of course.  They are home, recovering, trying to move past the sheer awfulness of yesterday morning.  I can't think about it without my jaw locking, my eyes brimming:  A day after Mir sat in the freezing cold, holding her precious daughter in her arms and begging her to stay awake until the ambulance arrived, I was stomping around, treating a slow and cantankerous laptop as if it were nuclear war.  Behaving as if a little spell of writer's block were a catastrophe.  Losing all sense of perspective.

I will wake up tomorrow morning, dear friends;  I will push the hair off Lloyd's forehead and kiss him until he wakes up.  I will remember that I had something to say about almonds.  I will also remember that everything I wanted to save from the laptop has been saved; that should the laptop fail again tomorrow morning, I have a lovely fat notebook from the paper shop to tie me over until I get to a working computer; and that what I really need in life doesn't rise or fall on a Transmeta Crusoe chip.