Mexico Journal: July 28, 2010

My hard drive crashed. Something as simple as an unending script. And then the white screen of death. And strangely, I don't care. I mean, I care, because it means that despite my headache, despite the fact that I have other (thankfully non computer related) work to do, I need to take Pietro in and have him revamped. Forget about the cost. I don't care. I have all my written files backed up on line and in my other computer which is currently at the house that is still not mine again. It almost feels appropriate. A sort of a spiritual cleansing.

I silently thank myself for not erasing the pictures from Mexico from my camera. I always erase everything upon downloading, but something told me not to this time. So, what is lost? Some photos that never made it to Flickr. (They were always the least important). What else? All my music, I think, is on an external hard drive. I am not worried if it is not. There will always be more music.

There is a cat breathing his bad-breath on me, draped lazily, one paw framing my notebook. His steady purr suggests that he is pleased with my existence. The California sun pours in through the window and though I am still precariously settled - at once at home and not - my wandering in Mexico seem a distant dream, and imagined escape from reality, a brief parenthesis that closed so neatly that even I am wont to conjure the sensation of Mexico City's grey drizzle, the Cineteca, the visits with Javier, Tania, Sharon and Imelda in the space that I once shared with them, and whose route --Blue line to Tasqueña, bus at the paradero del sur to Miramontes, getting off at the Superama that marks the beginning of the Alameda del sur -- all seems unreal, as if it is just a fabrication of my memory tricking my real, concrete, tangible present.

Bright blue sunshine, a light breeze, clean air. I. went to water polo, and I walked past the Media and Social Sciences building that a year and a half ago, before my last hard drive crash, was only bricks and glass and scaffolding - a potential, delicately postulated future. My habitual trek to the gym under welcoming sun, past the old gymansium and the soccer fields gave me the sensation of never having left, the sensation of never leaving.

I imagine under what circumstances I can remain in this town of suspended reality, this town where my heart is only whole because the millions of shards into which it shattered, all those years ago, are still concentrated in one mound. There is a simulacrum of wholeness, but I know it only that. Still, how can I knowingly let myself scatter to the wind, I wonder.

So the hard drive, annals of my life in tiny bundled information packets, does not strike panic into my heart, in fact, I feel momentarily liberated from addictions of the same organ. I have everything I need with a pencil and paper, my books are awaiting perusal for syllabus design and I suppose, begrudgingly, that I should deal with the last of my returning rituals, which now include fixing broken technology.