HOMELY PLANET

My computer guy emailed me today.  "Bad news," he said, like a solemn-faced doctor removing his bloody gloves and speaking to the family after losing a patient on the operating table.

Motherboard?  Completely fried.

Same with my graphics card.

He couldn't access data on either of my hard drives, either, and has since sent them to a recovery specialist.

The monitor is at a monitor specialist, but is likely a lost cause.

All I want, at this point, are the contents of my hard drive.  I have some writing there that I neglected to back up.  When I think of all the writing I've done over the years and lost - short stories, sketches, even a couple of one-act plays - it makes me shudder and want to launch my lunch over the keyboard.

I took the whole bohemian few possessions thing pretty seriously for much of my life, but now I wish I at least could have hung on to my old notebooks and works that I did manage to bang out.  Luckily most of the Piece of Meat stuff survived, thanks to the diligence of two of the other members.  If I were left in charge of the archives, they would have all been lost in last year's fire.