Tonight, I sit here in front of my trusty old HP laptop for the very last time. It's finally going to be replaced by a newer model, and will make the final journey down the basement steps to join its predecessors in the Retired Computer Graveyard. I have to admit that, even though I've grown to despise this wheezing, noisy son of a bitch, I can still taste a hint of bittersweet nostalgia on my tongue. This godawful rum and tonic concoction can't seem to wash it away. I should be nothing but one hundred percent glad at this point, but I'm kind of not - in fact, I should have already swapped this thing out, like, yesterday, but I wasn't quite ready to do it. Not just yet. I had to pull my creaky little office chair up to the keyboard one last time and type out a eulogy.
Here's to you, ancient HP laptop with the missing battery. Here's to both of us.
I wrote my first book on a PC that was even more decrepit than this poor old thing, bless its digital heart; my initial writing setup also included one of those boulder-shaped monitors from the 90's/early 2000's, a beer-soaked keyboard from the same era, and an elderly mouse that was barely alive but too stubborn to quit living, no matter what happened to the poor thing. I didn't have any writing programs at my disposal except Wordpad. It was good enough, I thought. Good enough for the likes of me.
Now, at this time, I was working as a temp in an manufacturing plant that made frames for pickup trucks and cargo vans. My days were long and my nights were very, very short. I would shove myself out of bed before sunrise and slog to work in whatever kind of shit weather Mother Nature happened to be throwing at me that day. When I got there, I'd exchange my work sweat for the privilege of being treated like a cretinous subhuman for eight glorious, soul-crushing hours. At end of the day, I would trudge home on aching feet, eat some dinner and plop down in front of the keyboard sometime after sunset. I'd work until my eyes were watering, usually somewhere between midnight and two in the morning. A few scant hours of sleep and WAAH! WAAH! WAAH! The alarm clock was shrieking into my ear that it was time to drag myself into consciousness and do it all over again.
To be honest, I don't think that damn book turned out anywhere near good enough to justify the sheer punishment I endured to write it. Others might disagree, but the book's merits or shortcomings aren't the focus here; the point of this anecdote is that I wrote a two-hundred-plus page novel on fucking WordPad, using an overheating-prone monolith of a computer tower and a forty-pound beast of a monitor, and I somehow accomplished this on 3-5 hours of sleep a night. It's a miracle the damned thing got written at all.
And then the tower died, as all things eventually do, and my wife bought me this old HP son of a gun here. It was a refurbished laptop she'd found online for super-cheap, because (for reasons that were never fully explained) it no longer had a battery. I didn't care about the battery. I was back in business for a hundred bucks. It was a godsend.
I got busy and spent the next two years intermittently pecking out a series of novellas and short stories. I published them in 2014 as a collection called Tripping Over Twilight. At the same time, I was working at an assembly plant that made car seats (they referred to them as Seating Systems, with both words capitalized) in the honorable and prestigious role of "Garbage Man". The Garbage Man did his thing inside a claustrophobic steel box that was attached to the outside of a bay door on the loading dock. It served as the gateway for two massive compactors. In the summer, that rusty tin can was an oven that stank of rotting garbage and pop cans fermenting away in the stifling heat. The walls of the steel box would be too hot to touch from around nine in the morning until just before sunset. In the winter, those same walls would be covered with a glacial sheet of ice, and I'd see my breath pluming out in clouds as I tossed the contents of the garbage bins into the appropriate compactor.
The garbage bins were made from two pieces of corrugated plastic, folded and joined together with a couple tiny Velcro strips to form a sort of large, open box. A plastic pallet served as the bottom of the box. They were just tall enough to make it difficult to reach the bottom, and the Velcro strips that held them together were invariably worn out, torn up or missing entirely. On many, many occasions, I watched helplessly as a bin I was dragging up the ramp fell apart and dumped its contents all over the place. Boxes, cans, leaking bags of garbage, several hundred pounds of loose paper - you name it, all over the fucking floor. As I already said, this happened on many, many occasions, almost daily. At first, I would always be seized by a white-hot fury whenever they fell apart, but after a few months of toiling away in my steel coffin, I'd just silently clean up the mess and get back to the business of waiting for my shift to be over. There's only so many times you can get that angry about something before you get numb to it. It's a defense mechanism. It's either that or completely lose your fucking mind.
The Garbage Man often had to serve double-duty as a janitor. I soon discovered that a few of the men were fond of writing crude epithets on the walls of the toilet stalls with their own shit. There were also some women who enjoyed playing a fun treasure-hunting game called Hide The Used Sanitary Pad. I distinctly remember crouching down beside a toilet to scrub the words "SHIT CUNT" off the wall, and I could only wonder at what it meant - was the author referencing someone he hated, or a literal vagina that also serves as an anus? Or was he simply blathering bad words out into the void in his own excrement, the choice finger paint of the disenfranchised working man in today's society?
I scrubbed, and I wondered, and I fucking gagged on the stink as I hosed the poop graffiti down with industrial-strength cleaner, sending trickles of brownish-green down the wall to drip onto the floor tiles. I knelt there with my empty bank account and my boots that were falling apart, and I scrubbed, and I hated. I hated so very, very much.
After work, I would drive home in my decaying van to sit in front of this laptop, and I would try to figure it all out. Almost like writing a grocery list, really. I'd try to quantify, rationalize and categorize all the hurts and the injustices. I would line them all up in a row and inject them into my writing with a dull syringe, night after night. My laptop was a sponge, absorbing my impotent rage, my frustrations and fears. It would soak up my poisonous invective and turn it into a story.
When I left that job, I felt that I'd hit the very bottom of the shit-barrel, and it could only get better from there. I was wrong. It could get infinitely worse, and it did. I worked in a warehouse owned by a major clothing company for a while, and I often saw tiny bare footprints on the boxes that came in shipping containers from Southeast Asia. I'd stare at those wispy, diminutive footprints and my soul would wither. After that, there was a blur of janitorial jobs, more scrubbing shit off walls, more half-eaten sandwiches thrown contemptuously onto the floor that I had just finished mopping, more jeering and sly insults that would come back to float around my brain as I tried to fall asleep. I landed a job in the freezer of a meat rendering plant where everything was packaged and tagged by hand, a slavish assembly line in the dead of night, a frozen circle of hell where no one smiled and no one hoped for a better future. Days and nights melted together in a continuous cycle of pain, cold, exhaustion and rage. I lost weight. I would snap at my wife and stepson for nothing at all. I was turning into an unpleasant caricature, and I was helpless to stop it.
And through it all, I kept pouring my rage and shame onto the screen of this brave little HP. It began to wheeze and falter, sickened by my negative energy. It would freeze up and sputter and choke on my words, and I would rage at it, as I raged at everyone and everything. During this period, When the Stars Fall was born. I nurtured it with misery and nourished it with anger, and it slowly grew from a series of ideas into a full-fledged novel.
All things revolve in a circular pattern. True to form, I eventually found myself in the role of Garbage Man once again. Different factory, different setup, but it was all the same. The Garbage Man was not really a man - he was moldy, smelly old rag that existed to mop up the psychic piss-puddles left behind by those who seek to diminish their fellow human beings. More shit-scrubbing, more teeth-chattering in the cold and reeling beneath the brutality of the summer sun. The laptop was now poisoned to the point of barely being able to perform, but it kept staggering forward with its head down, pacing me in our mutual daily struggle to somehow find the strength to keep going in the face of failure.
Well, we did it, HP. Together, we finished a novel, five novellas and a handful of decent short stories. I infected you with my own soul-rot, made you an extension of myself, and against all odds, you survived it long enough for me to finally acquire a replacement. You did good, buddy. You've earned your final rest, and if I was capable of shedding a tear, I'd be sobbing all over the keyboard as I write this eulogy. I've grown to hate you over the years, and I'm sure the feeling is probably mutual; even so, I admire your strength, tenacity and unbreakable spirit. This motley collection of circuitry and plastic is a better man than I could ever hope to be, and I want the world to know that. I want them to know that hate is weakness, not strength. I want them to understand that salvation lives within acceptance, and no matter what they do to you, no one can hold authority over your hearts and minds. Freedom lives inside us, and try as they might, no man can take ever that from you.
I'm tired of hating. I've hated my entire life, and I can say with the confidence of experience that hatred diminishes you. It eats up everything good inside you and leaves a withered husk in its wake. With this new laptop, there is a fresh start, a new era in which I can come to terms with who I am, my trespasses against others, and their trespasses against myself. I can find acceptance, and in time, perhaps even peace. I want to be a better man. I need to be a better man. Time is running out, and there's so much work left to do.
Goodbye, old laptop. A new beginning will rise from your ashes. I'm going to get better. I'm going to reclaim the love that was stolen from my heart. I'm going to be free.
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