Begging for Blogcess

My laptop took ill last week. And since then, I’ve been cheating on it.

I expected to feel bad, but I don’t.

“Wanton, aren’t you?” said Mary.

“I never made any promises.”

“Didn’t you?” she said, smiling. “Wasn’t that you with the warranty?”

“The warranty expired,” I said coyly. “Besides, writing has nothing to do with the keyboard.”

And it doesn’t.

I wrote everything longhand until just three years ago.

“When you write,” asked my boss at the time, “how do you do it?”

“What do you mean,” I said. “You mean like how do I find the time, or how, physically, do I do it?”

“Physically.”

“I write it out. I have a favorite pen, Mr. Black, and I write it out, every other line, in a notebook.”

She looked at me sideways. “Isn’t it your birthday in a couple weeks?”

“Yes.”

“You have my credit card?”

I was her assistant. She knew I had her credit card. “Yes.”

Gayle had a way of looking you directly in the eyes at times, and she did it now. “Use it. Buy yourself a laptop.”

I stared at her.

She turned to pick up her phone. I turned to leave.

“Pearl?” she called.

I faced her.

“Don’t go over a thousand.”

Like so many other things I believed could not be improved upon – hot fudge malts, grilled food, sex – it was again proven to me that what you start out with is probably not the experience’s pinnacle.

My Birthday Present, as I came to think of it, was fudge after a lifetime of chocolate.

And now? Yes. I am wantonly cheating on it.

My Birthday Present would want it that way, don’t you think? I mean, it was always about the end product, not about the way we got there.

Besides. It’s an object.

I’ve become a computer opportunist.

Hey, you mind if I use your computer for a bit?

Friends and family have been gracious about it, and I am forced, as they say, to get it where I can. I write, visit blogs, comment frantically. How long can this go on? How long before I run out of my supply of people’s goodwill and am forced downtown to hold a cardboard sign that says Will Work for Internet Access?

As it turns out, a couple of weeks.

My Birthday Present will be back fully functioning – we have an understanding, after all – and I will once again have easy access to the space between both my and others’ minds and written words in roughly two weeks.

Until then, I live by my wits and stalk the wild keyboard.