Good Acting Helmet

This morning at approximately 6:10 am, I knocked nearly a pint of water off my kitchen counter straight into my open laptop. It performed the kind of spluttering, strobing death rattle that you might expect from a technological device in a movie from 1995 like Johnny Mnemonic.


All day at work I worried. It was like my child was in intensive care. On my break in the alleyway beside the odiferous dumpster, I called Scott for a status update: Fan on, laptop propped upside down like a teepee. No visible drippage.

The green light where the plug attaches to the computer had stayed on, and I found myself anthropomorphizing. The plug was like its oxygen mask, or heart monitor. As long as it stayed bright, its tender lifeline still spiked with electrical activity.

Endangering the lives of TWO thousand-plus dollar laptops in a span of two weeks calls for some reflection. Two weeks ago I spilled a pot of dirt into Scott's laptop. He refers to the incident as "the plant attack," whereas I go with the more realistic "girlfriend soil dump".

It's possible that my Freudian desire to annihalite expensive Apple computers will not run its course until I have destroyed four computers using the four traditional elements of water, earth, wind and fire. My rampage only half finished, I still need to ignite a Macintosh bonfire, and strap my computer loosely to a roof in Iowa during tornado season.

For now, my computer is still recouperating in front of the fan. It may never return to normal functioning, but the files appear to be undamaged. If I eventually have to wrench them from its miserable carcass, I will ponder how sometimes in movies and television from 1995 and other years, characters have to remove valuables like guns and radio transmitters from dead bodies, and it is gross.