Ob-so-LETE
My laptop’s on his last legs. Where does that phrase last legs come from? Probably not something bipedal, since the same phrase could only be last LEG… I’m guessing from horses, like looking a gift horse in the mouth.
Well, my gift horse is on his last legs. He’s so pumped full of spyware I feel like there’s nothing integral for these programs left to infect, they’ve just taken up all the space inside him that’s not Excel or Firefox or gmail notifier, which are the three programs I have up right now, which is also the limit to the number I can have up at once before “serious problems” arise.
Jeez, even the top monitor half of the computer doesn’t stand upright anymore. Right now I have a small pile of t-shirts and magazines propping it up.
The issues now go way beyond his painful slowness. He has no more memory, no more space to store new information. The rest is too valuable to expunge.
This computer is five years old — 1-2-3-4-FIVE years old. I remember when I got it, spry and sturdy, with that new computer smell. Now it’s teeming with more viruses than the whore who patrols the grounds outside the factory where this thing was put together five and a half years ago.
I’ve described what’s left of this computer in narrow strokes, because flashes of memory is all that will soon remain of it. Let’s let the depiction match the thing itself.
My next step will be on one of those two roads that diverge in a yellow wood, the PC road that is well-worn, and the Mac road that is slightly less well-worn but would love the company anyway. It won’t matter. In years and years I’ll say it with a sigh that “my new Mac funneled my musical vision – extracted those strands of melody from within.” Or “I made the first podcast, which turned into THE forum for my expression, musical and verbal and intellectual, more so than static, demanding words ever could.” Or I could sigh and then say “the PC I got on the cheap was all I needed to get me to write more, a bit of hardware that could run Word without taking fifteen full minutes to start up. For too long I let the tail wag the dog, let my technology’s slowness bring down my mental capacity to its celeron speed.” I could say any of those things, and it won’t matter a lick, because while the medium is the message, it is the release that is the thing, just slightly but significantly more important than the vessel.
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