Gosh, I haven’t touched this thing in ages.  The log, I mean.  Part of the territory that comes with having an aesthetic for a computer.  Two Lents ago, the computer decided to join me in giving up messing around on the internet for Lent.  The computer liked the new sense of quiet and peace so much, it stayed offline for a forgotten number of months.   It bothered me at first.  I get used to listening to Youtube music while I write.  However, along with easy listening comes easy distractions, and I know that more often than not, I wasn’t bringing my writing up to its fullest potential, but my procrastination skills went stratospheric.  Best of all, it never felt like I was wasting time, until the end of an afternoon, when I’d discover I hadn’t done much.  That’s why I gave it up for Lent, except for occasional emails.  I keep thinking that I’ll give up my old beast, this ancient (for a computer) Windows fossil that refuses to connect online except at the most unexpected moments for an unknown amount of time.  I keep thinking that I’ll go out computer shopping, find some fine, slick masterpiece of efficiency that will never do me wrong, will connect online whenever I ask it, and when I’m writing a document, won’t ever playfully hop the space-bar into the middle of an unrelated paragraph and continue my thought there until I “control-z” it back again.  Except that, just when I think that I’m really going to, the little globe image blinks into existence down in the lower right, telling me that my curmudgeonly machine is open for business with the rest of the world, and so I get online, check Schlock Mercenary, watch a Youtube, let my Norton security go to town and install all the updates it pesters me about, and once in a while remember that I have a blog and since I paid for the thing I should write in it.  And thoughts of a new computer fade, because this old cantankerous, 2009 beast, which I acquired as a hand-me-down (albeit unused) for my first year of college, still more or less serves me.  I’ve got a few miscellaneous stickers on it.  I’ve got photographs of trees and a butterfly from when I took it to Barry’s Bay, Ontario.  I’ve got two pencil illustrations I drew on scrap paper from even earlier years, when I worked in a convenience store with my second oldest brother, and during our downtime, out of view of the security camera, we talked endlessly about the story I write to this day, about the adventures of Galdir the elf soldier and Tal Alonspike, and Ashkin the ranger.   This computer I write on is old, cranky, quirky, slow, and it fits my fingers.  I have literally never written the story on anything else, and I feel like my hands might mutiny if I forced them to type on an unfamiliar keyboard.  And I appreciate not being able to go online.  When the beast does connect, I appreciate that too, and try not to waste the opportunity (although, of course, I do a little.  The internet is fun, after all) because I literally never know when the dreaded red “X” is going to take the place of the tiny globe, and I am cut off from the universe!  Except, of course, I am not.  And the less I am online, the less cut off from the universe I actually am.  Because while our lives are online these days, it’s good to remember that our lives are not the universe.  If the internet broke forever tomorrow, we would all be heartily inconvenienced, and I hope and pray that does not happen, because people will most certainly die.  But we wouldn’t all die, and maybe even fewer people will die than estimated, because God runs the world, whether or not it’s online.  God is often inscrutable, but never cruel.

I appreciate this computer’s foibles.  It is imperfect, like me, and it doesn’t work the way I want it to, like the rest of the world.  If it gained an AI intelligence, I don’t think I’d even mind it at all.  Because I think it would be a good person, even if it was a grumpy, old person that wouldn’t oblige my every whim.  It is good to be denied.  It took me only a little while to appreciate it’s inverted gift, although I’ve never tried to put it into words.  But this computer gave me back some time.  Time that I would have used online, except I couldn’t go online.  So I read books, I watched documentaries, I went for bike rides and walks, I saw the sky, I saw roads and fields and forested streams.  I saw hummingbirds and ravens.  I met people.  I saw mountains and the sea.  I watched angels Open the Flower over a desert.  I watched the sandhill cranes of Earth flying with the dawnlight turning their wings to gold, and heard their music.

I treasure this old computer, for relics are meant to be treasured, because the irony is that, if it could have told me only one thing over it’s years of service and thousands of miles I’ve carried it thither and yon, is that the internet, while wonderful, is not everything.  That everything is far more wonderful and that’s why I write this small tribute to it, in gratitude for it’s service, in this uncertain moment of internet connection.  Because connection is not all it’s cracked up to be.

I should know.  My computer became a monk to prove it.