I decided that this morning I would get out of bed and wander over to Buzz on Santa Monica to get some writing done. I knew I’d have to make my way over to Rocket at some point to help Boss back up his hard drive, but that didn’t have to come until later. I just wanted to get some work done–some clean, undistracted work. Two hours at a wobbly table, perhaps, balancing a cup of coffee paid for with two of my last three dollars, maybe get my mind off the stress of being overdrawn by about half a hundred bucks with payday still days away. I sat in my car and did a quick inventory: notebook? Check. Pen? Check. CD player? Check. Extra batteries? Check. Private Suit by Bettie Serveert on CD? Check. And I was off.

I got halfway down the street when Boss called. I answered, as I always do, in case it’s an emergency.

Uh…no.

shitshitshitshitshitshitshit.

So I put the car in reverse and backed into my parking space. After registering the domains (icelandersontheweb.com) I drove out to their house in Cheviot Hills (near Century City) and quickly determined that their hard drive had ground to halt.

I spent the rest of the day in computer hell. Here’s a picture of how things looked on my desk at about two in the afternoon. It’s about representative of how my life feels right now.

And here’s a pic of my room to prove it. I got so frustrated with the way things were going with the repair (faulty floppy drives, ribbon cables too short, missing power plugs) that I did a little throwing of things around.

After some wrangling, some luck, and a whole lot of irritation, I got a new hard drive installed, formatted, re-windowed and running, along with Norton Antivirus, Microsoft Office and the wonder that is AOL 6.0 That was six hours after I picked it up, and well after my work shift at Rocket was supposed to begin. Luckily, Sean said he’s work for me, but that’s another thirty-five bucks out of my pocket. And the hard drive I installed was my own newly purchased drive, so Boss owes me for that as well. I’ll just charge him thirty-five bucks extra.

So now that it’s almost midnight, I’ve had time to decompress. I’m surrounded by junk. I’m exhausted. But damned if I’m not going to sit down and try to get some writing done. People are waiting for Blood & Mist. But I’ll toy around with something else. A little something I’m calling Elemental.

Anyway, the point of all this is…when things get like this, it’s tough to find time to write in this thing. But stay tuned for further adventures.