A blue line is moving across my computer screen. My computer is being updated. Splendid. I could do with some updating myself. Thing is, my computer needs substantially more than a newer version of its operating system. I’m not sure what that is, but the needs are so enormous and so insatiable that they cannot be met.

OK, some technical details. At one point, bowing to necessity, I used a Windows PC. Voice recognition software, the sort of technology that is rendering this blog, required Windows at that point. So why argue? I didn’t. Until Apple came up with something pretty good in the voice-to-text department. Then I ditched my Windows PC. And what to do with the old files? In fact, when Apple’s version of Dragon Naturally Speaking proved inferior, I complicated things by running two operating systems at the same time. This is possible. Not advisable, perhaps. But, yes, there is an overarching software application that will let you do this.

Bringing me to the present day…I am starting a third book and realizing that I’ve covered most of the rhetorical ground once before, maybe even twice, and my thought was that all I have to do is resurrect some old files, and pull out some verbiage, some vision, something in the writing area…from then into now. So, for the first time in well over a year, I fired up the Windows side of my computer and discovered, well, things weren’t that simple. Windows 10 has been updated several times. So I had to go through that. But, along the way, I remembered that I hate Windows. And even if I can recover some of this old stuff, is it worth it?

Which has sent me into a profound reconsideration of time, its passage, the saving of the old, defining of the new. And so on. All sorts of profound writerly thoughts. All of which comes down to, why read this old stuff? Whatever is on the Windows side of my iMac, who cares? Whatever is there will reflect my consciousness at the moment. And that’s the interesting thing. That consciousness belongs to another time and, in fact, another character. And I’m not writing fiction. There aren’t multiple characters. There’s just the non-fiction narrator, me, and I don’t have multiple personalities. Or if I do, I try to keep them under one hat, as it were.

Still, there is the maddening reality that my computer is out of control. There’s old stuff in there. It might be interesting. Then again, it might not be. And to put a finer point on it, let me say that when I last opened up the Windows part of my Mac this afternoon I couldn’t read most of the files. That’s right. I would see the icon for Microsoft Word files, but nothing else. Just a little blue square. With a W in it. You know what I mean.

The question being, is it worth it? Which is always the question, of course. 

This pandemic has narrowed the sense of the possible in ways I find most unwelcome. What about Mahler? His First Symphony is on offer tonight in San Francisco’s Civic Center. I won’t be there again. I found a recipient this time for our tickets. But as I say, this cramps my style. And what is my style? A much better question. One good thing that deprivation has revealed to me is that I do like live performance. There’s something so pleasantly ephemeral about the one-night stand that is a concert or a play. The orchestra tunes up. The curtain goes up. Something happens next. Then everyone goes home. And they forget the evening, or they remember it, and that’s all there is to it.

On Tuesday, San Francisco’s Health Department has decided, we can go back into restaurants without our masks. I don’t buy it. I’m not sure I’m going anywhere unmasked ever again. But of course I am. What do people look like? That is the other question. Whether ‘tis nobler to wear a piece of blue cloth upon ones face, or a piece of black cloth, while pierced by the slings and arrows of outrageous epidemiological fortune. That is the question. And the answer, as determined by the four Cambridge lads who comprised Beyond the Fringe, was to observe: 

What ho, saucy Worcester!