So lately, the A key on my keyboard has been sticking.
Very annoying, especially when I am playing a 3D video game with traditional WSAD style controls and find myself compulsively sliding to the left.
And of course, I knew what I should do : prise the key up and clean underneath it. Odds are, it was sticking because of some gunk that had accumulated under it over the years, and a quick cleaning of the area in question would fix it up in a jiffy.
But as my entire life loudly and clearly proclaims, no matter how sensible, mature, and congruent with your long term best interests an action is, it’s still easier to not do it than to do it, and so I never got around to it.
In my defenses, up until today, it was a problem I could temporarily fix. When the key got stuck, I could unstick it by lifting one side of the key up a little with my fingernail.
It would pop back up, and I would be on my merry way until it did it again.
Well today that stopped working. So it was either I had to prise the key up and clean under it, or learn to live without the letter A
nd tht ws not relly vible lterntive.
So I pried it up and of course it was absolutely filthy under there. Why?
Because I’ve had this keyboard for almost a decade and have never ever cleaned it all that time. And because I eat at my computer.
So the underkey area was stuffed with compacted crumbs and dead skin cells. Compacted to the point where I more or less had to chisel it out.
Such is the price of skipping basic maintenance, folks. Popping the keys off your keyboard and cleaning underneath is not a difficult or unpleasant task, and can easily be done while you binge-watch your favorite hourlong drama.
Or you can use one of those cans of compressed air. Then it’s even fun! FWOOSH!
So I spent some time chiseling out my keyboard’s undercrust and managed to excavate the key in question and those around it for good measure and then… found I could not make the damned keys fit back in.
I think the problem is the diabetic nerve damage in my fingertips. Most likely.
So I panicked a little. The need to blog was surging inside me but being blocked by a keyboard now missing A, Capslock, S, and W.
Capslock and W I might live without, but the others….
So after a standard period of fretting and dithering, I decided I had no choice but to jettison my meager supply of dignity and go, hat in hand, to beg Joe and Julian to once more rescue me from the tragedy of my own incompetence.
They weren’t home. Uh oh.
But I am actually glad that’s how it worked out because it meant I had no choice but to rescue myself. Luckily, on the way back to my room, I passed my ancient Lenovo computer that was the computer I used before this one, and that was the computer Julian used before he got a Macbook.
And lo and behold, there was a perfectly good keyboard attached to it. YOINK!
So that’s the keyboard I am using right now, and my brand new one that I just ordered should arrive tomorrow.
Because I still ain’t gonna clean this damned thing.
Fuck it. One decade of service is enough!
More after the break.
These dark corridors
In my dreams, I walked… and yet, I didn’t really walk. I floated down the cold grey corridors with my feet not quite touching the ground and no sensation of weight, and yet my brain told me I was walking, and I believed it.
Anyhow, in these dreams I “walked” down endless soft gray corridors lit by the walls’ cold inner glow. The air was perfectly still and I could feel it flowing over my naked limbs like the voluptuous caress of an indifferent ghost.
But wait…. I’m not naked. I’m in a robe of some sort. Or is it that old winter jacket I wore when I was 8? Why do I keep thinking I am nude?
I am sure that the corridors and indeed this whole experience are repeating endlessly, yet I detect no pattern and nothing ever seems familiar.
Everything I emit – sounds, heat, odors, that ineffable feeling of presence that tells you someone is watching you – bounces back at me at strange angles quite painfully, so that I find myself trying to emit as little as possible just to maintain the peace.
And always there was the heavy, directionless dread. I felt haunted and possessed but by something with no center and no location, just a feeling that saturated the very space around me and preserved me in arctic permafrost, only letting me move enough to keep me from freezing completely.
Inevitably, the silence began to speak. But refused to make sense.
At first it was merely a background murmur, easily dismissed. But then it slowly got louder in the manner of an approaching crowd of talkative people, till eventually it was all around me filling the air with a rich ragout of conversation which I could hear every syllable of but could make absolutely no sense of.
And yet, I knew they were speaking my native Polish. All the phonemes and syllables were familiar but the words were random combinations of them.
And yet, spoken with correct timing, cadence, and melody, exactly as if this was proper spoken Polish. And with these sounds came the profound feeling that I was missing out on an absolutely fascinating conversation that would illuminate and inform and delight me more than any conversation I’d ever have but I was just too stupid to understand it.
Then just as I was realizing this, they stopped. All at once, as if by secret cue. One second the air was as full of talk as a spring meadow is of birdsong, and the next the silence had returned with all the finality of the closing of a tomb door.
But I’d stopped “walking” at some point and now I stood in front of a great mirror that filled the same 90 percent of my field of view no matter which way I looked.
And I knew that if I took a look into the crystal-dark depths of the mirror, I would see something glorious and wonderful that would cleanse me of my pain like a warm shower and heal me so deeply and completely that I would never be the same again.
And it scared the hell out of me.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.