I Think I Sorta Miss My Mind

Late last night
I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got
Till it’s gone
– Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”

When my sons were younger – in the prime of their dad-baiting years – pretending to be me when I made some kind of dumb remark, they’d screw up their faces, usually crossing their eyes while staring skyward at the same time and say, with a pained expression, “Geez, I think I sorta miss my mind.”
Gradually, it turned into the whole family’s attempt at self-deprecating humor – more often at my expense than the others’. (Do I detect a little paternal paranoia?)
Well, two days ago “missing my mind” took on a whole new meaning.
My computer died. “Boot Failure,” it announced, “System Halted.”
My heart entered my throat upside down.
Not just an indecipherable error message that rectified itself by hitting the on/off switch. Not a network error (someone else’s problem), no storm surge that turning the machine off for thirty seconds would correct, thank you very much.
No, this was a dead, or at least terminally ill, hard drive, something I had never faced before.
The big yellow taxi, I discovered, had taken away me – not Joni’s old man.
In a relatively short number of years, a large chunk of my psyche had come to reside in the electronic brain sitting under my desk, and the sudden realization of its demise was petrifying. How had I managed to transfer so much of me, so much stored knowledge that I considered to be in some way mine to manage, or at least that was part of my human self, into this machine, so that now I relied upon it for, not simply book work, but for life work?
No longer in charge, and I didn’t even get two-weeks’ notice. My gut lurched.
Ghost Busters, where are you when the otherworldly interferes with the mundane?
Here I was merrily cantering along, nodding my head like a pony, electronically communicating with numerous others, turning on my machine whenever I felt uncertain of what I wanted to say and scanning a huge list of helpful headlines to find something appropriate in a matter of a few minutes or even seconds. No thumbing through the shelf of Encyclopedia Britannica in Mom’s cleansed and polished book case where the “look” of the lineup was as important as the meaning.
We’ve created our own Towers of Babble that have come to lead us through life now, and they’re not going away, just being upgraded every six months, it seems.
Many of us (maybe most) don’t give the process a thought until the machines decide they’ve had it and close their hard drives.
Then, the geeks that we warned our children about take over.
A while ago Robert Frost would have referred to them as travelers on the road less taken. Now they are indispensable passengers on the electronic interstates . . . and that has made all the difference.
I could have tried to correct things without human help. The sign on the screen was obviously designed to settle my nerves. What had happened, it inferred, is really a very simple problem. The following sequence of settings is all buggered up, but don’t fret. Just press “r” to get things going again.
Well, fortunately, I knew better. I didn’t press “r.” I called my DSL supplier at GMA. A very calm voice at the other end of the line said, ”Hello, this is Scott. May I help you?”
He may have thought I choked on a peach pit from the way my voice quavered. “Yehzoo, Scott, I turned on my computer, and the error message said, ‘Boot Failure. System Halted.’”
I had the sinking suspicion that “system halted” meant I was looking at a machine that refused to look back at me. It took everything I had entered into it over the past five years, swallowed the data whole and wouldn’t give it back. And it did this without asking my permission, without giving me any warning, by just not booting.
In my day, booting was a physical reaction either to too many Michelobs or a girl friend’s Dear Edd gram. We tried to confine it to a manure pit behind Bruce Baker’s barn.
This boot failure happened in my own study.
Scott gulped, and I said in a shaky voice, “This isn’t something to do with my DSL, is it?” Hoping against hope that it was.
“No,” he said, “this is serious. In fact, if it were my computer, I wouldn’t try to fix it myself.”
“Oh,” I mumbled, recognizing that the scope of the problem lay even beyond the ken of this pro and that a neophyte such as myself shouldn’t consider twinkling the tweeter. I should simply stick to holding back the bile that was heading up my intestinal tract at an alarming speed.
Reality struck with a vengeance as I realized the depth of confidence I had grown to place in a keyboard stroke and the blissful ignorance with which I did it.
Merrily we roll along.
Well, like it or not, this is the world in which we live. My choices are to become more knowledgeable about it or to ignore it and try to find solace in the upper branches of a tall redwood.
Given my recent exposure, I choose the former.
In my advanced years I’m not going to become as proficient as my grandchildren at living in gigabytes – and age alone isn’t the only determining factor here; my shortage of techno-smarts plays a role, too. But, I have developed a closer consciousness to what I do with computers as a result of losing them altogether.
When it comes to springtime at the Senior Center, I can probably geek it up with the best of them. After all, Joni and I have looked at life from both sides now. (What I always admired in her music was her intelligent mix of what she said with how she said it.)
A machine alone won’t give meaning to words and harmony. An advantage of old age is the comfort we gain with asking what twenty years prior we would consider too “dumb” a question to voice. Machines find things fast. Only you can supply those things with meaning. Don’t forget that the sheep in author Phil Dick’s android dreams are still just electronic. They need you to bring them life.