An Anxious Time.

Today I booked my computer in for his rebuild.

Yes, my computer is male and I talk to him. It would seem ludicrously inconsistent to talk to trees, my car, sheep, roadkills, stranded earthworms, a 2ft tall wooden statue of the goddess Guanyin, the little people, and Americans, and yet fail to include my computer. How strange would a person have to be to commit such an oversight?

So, I’m nervous at the prospect of being sans computer for a day or two. Now I know what it feels like to be a wife-dependent man facing the prospect of having his helpmeet taken into hospital for a couple of days for some minor operative procedure. I was never a wife-dependent man, but the computer is something else entirely.

My computer is my point of contact with the outside world, you see, because I don’t socialise. It isn’t that I’m socially awkward; I’m not. It’s just that I’m unusually intolerant of cultural expectations and the generality of human nature. Besides, what would socialising have to offer somebody who’s done everything he wanted to do apart from the things that were too expensive and still are? And the one person in my physical orbit who captured my devoted attention in the whole of the past ten years deserted me most indecorously, so I don’t bother any more. I find special people in cyberspace and talk to them instead, and for that you need a computer.

So that’s why I’m nervous, extremely anxious in fact. How will I face the lonely hours, and suppose something should go wrong with the minor operative procedure? The time set for admission is Wednesday at noon. High noon. Gulp.