Sunday, September 15, 2002
Last night . . . Well, maybe it's best if I don't start with last night. I think maybe I have to work up the courage to get to last night. So, instead, I'll begin with this morning and work backwards. This morning, I awoke, after only four and a half hours sleep (but hey, you can sleep when you're dead, right?) to find myself lying in a very large puddle of warm cat urine. From there, it's all been downhill. I have a feeling that, when I stand at the end of this day and look back at it from the distance of 24 hours, the warm pool of cat urine will definitely seem like the bright spot. Maybe I'd better just go back to last night, after all.
Last night, and yesterday afternoon, I wrote the first thousand plus words on the Farscape essay for sfsite.com; I figured, when I decided to call it a night about 11:30, that the piece was maybe half-written. And it was a good piece, better than the one up at Revolutionsf.com (which I rather like, so that's saying something). I wasn't sleepy, so I decided the wind down by doing some update work at Nebari.Net. First off, I discovered that Gothic.Net's ISP had crashed again (and Darren McKeeman was at a party in LA with his cellphone turned off), taking all my sites with it. But worse yet, we found that many of the html and jpg files related to the Farscape website, all contained within a single folder on my iBook's hard drive, were inexplicably corrupt. I had to download the main page off the web and, basically, start from scratch. And that should have set off the warning sirens in my head, but I was too busy thinking about ten or fifteen things at once and too pissed at how much trouble the web (and AOL, IE5, Blogger, and Netscape) have given me this week. I tend to nest things on my hd in rather intricate patterns serving a particular mnemonic fuction for me and the new essay for sfsite.com was in a seperate folder, but also within the same more inclusive folder, as all the corrupted Nebari.Net files. It's hard to recall precisely what happened next. I can only say it happened very quickly. As I was trying to solve the mystery of the corrupted files, other files began to disappear from the folder. A search would locate them, but the computer was unable to open them, telling me only that the application that created the files was missing and they might have been deleted. I had deleted nothing. Then, suddenly, everything in the essay folder, including most especially the unfinished piece for sfsite.com, vanished. A frantic search turned up nothing, only the same "may have been deleted message." In seconds, some casacde effect had wiped all the files from the Nebari.Net folders. Everything else on the iBook was backed up, either here or one of Rogue's hds, but not the new essay. Nor had I printed it yet. 16 years of working on Macs with no crashes, no viruses, and no bizarre data losses has made me complacement.
By 3:30 a.m. I finally gave up, hoping against hope I could get help from Apple at 8 a.m., and laid down, not expecting to sleep. I can imagine few feelings as sickening as having lost something that I've written. Knowing I can't put it back together again from memory. But I did fall asleep.
And woke up at 8 a.m. sharp, in a puddle of warm cat piss (there was no sign of the cat), from a dream of an alternate history WWII where all the French resistence fighters were androids. There were paratroopers and topographic maps with precise red triangles drawn on them. After that, the cat piss seemed rather tame.
Anyway, we called Apple and they instructed me to reboot from the start-up disk. I was reluctant, as I suspected a reboot would mean the loss of any possibility of recovering the "invisible" files. I was reassured that wasn't an issue. So I did a restart from the disk. The files were still missing. We ran Disk First aid and discovered there was a problem with the system's tree that couldn't be repaired by First Aid. The Apple tech said to reboot again. I was even more reluctant this time, but what the fuck, I figured she gets paid to know what she's doing. This time, though, all we get are the start-up chimes and then the gray screen with the smiling Mac. And nothing else. About this time, the tech confesses she doesn't know what's up, that there may be a virus at work, and suggests we look into data retrieval. Meanwhile, I can't even access my fucking hd. She may have said she was sorry. I neither remember nor do I care.
This is all boring as hell, isn't it?
See, that's the thing about journals, real journals. Reading other people's silly little horror stories is, almost always, boring as hell.
So, Jennifer calls Rogue. 45 minutes on the phone lead to no breakthroughs. The new article is simply gone daddy gone and I can't access my hd, only read it with the machine running off the start-up disk.
I suppose I'll get my head clear and try to begin a new essay for sfsite.com; my deadline is tonight.
And there's still the cat piss to deal with. It's going to be a beautiful fucking day.
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