The Sausage-Maker

I don't always know what's going to happen in this space when I start, I'll be honest. At this point, 17 years in to the process of posting at minimum once per week, I don't have a problem trusting in my ability to generate something once the fingers typings starts. I will say that feeling is helped along in no small measure by having neither standards nor expectations.

There's plenty to talk about, really world-shattering stuff like COVID or climate change or voter suppression or the Angels releasing Albert Pujols after 10 years with the team. There's never a shortage of life-historical events to inspire the grandiloquence or amateur sophistry this blog endeavor conceives, gestates in and births from, 52 brand new times every year.

But this week, the known process, the routine, the ritual of gearing up to Frankenstein-stitch this aggregation of corpses together was interrupted by the stodgy, pokey, balky coughing to life of the MacBook Pro that midwife's this into the world.

It's been a long road, me and my silver MacBook buddy. It's been obsolete from almost the second I bought it in I think 2011. At the time, MacBook Air was new, but rejected that perverse novelty as I couldn't fathom why anyone would bother buying a laptop without a built-in CD/DVD drive. Just to let you know how that's going, the same CD-R has been stuck in the non-functioning drive since about I think 2015.

This is the first computer I ever owned that was not a PC. It was also the first one I ever owned that had built-in--like they expected you to use it!--WiFi capability. The ancient textbook-sized Dell laptop this replaced needed a backpack-sized USB attachment to get something as fancy as no-wires internet to work on it.

But Macs are Macs and nobody does planned obsolescence like Apple. It stopped being able to update the operating system three or four iterations ago. Since then it's been a steady degradation in application execution efficiency to the point now where boot-up time can be measured by the stubby hand on the analog clock that probably rivals it for computing power.

At some point I'm going to have to make the hard decision to spend probably a third of what I spent on this in 2011 dollars for something that does a thousand more things at orders of magnitude quicker speeds. It doesn't seem like too hard of a decision when I type it all out.

I'm going to hold onto it for a while, hoping it doesn't crap out entirely on me in the meantime. I don't think of myself as the sentimental type when it comes to material things, so it's more a math question than a feelings one. I've got three offspring-birthdays and two graduations to get through this month. Plus according to my last credit card statement, I've really prioritized overspending on food I don't have to go out and pick up myself as a lifetstyle cornerstone.

Until I work through that, I can enjoy a little more time in the company of the amiably functional-adjacent machine that has carried me forward since the first George W. Bush administration. We've worked through some shit, this keyboard and me. The memories bring me comfort and warmth, almost as much as the battery pack warms my quadriceps as it overheats the machine when I ask it to do something as resource-heavy as type into a blank field. I'm not ready to be rid of that.