My Best Friend

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I heard this song first when I was in Thailand two summers ago. My Ex and I were staying with her family in a small house ferreted somewhere in central Bangkok. Her two step-brothers, both young, were rampant with the kind of electric kid-curiosity that people later classify as ADHD. The younger of the two was very social and athletic and the older was a heavyset intellectual with a fondness for computers and the indoors. I immediately identified with him.

Growing up I didn't have many friends (or at least I've convinced myself I didn't in an effort to now appear more accessible, but I doubt it). I vividly remember my father coming home with a Leading Edge 286 and developing a quick bond with the glowing box. I tried typing in a math equation into the DOS prompt and while I didn’t get my equation solved, I did get a response… “Command not found”… this machine had spoken to me and although it had said I was wrong, it did not judge me. I felt very judged by my piers as a kid, and this unmalicious response tweaked something deep inside of me. I felt a quick flash of camaraderie from this computer, and although it didn’t say anything I knew the computer felt it also.

The coming years would solidify how true this was. I didn’t just use my computer, I became my computer - friends came and went but the data was forever (until it crashed and it was lost and the mourning process commenced). And to this day it’s still true, albeit in it’s hyper-advanced form. I spend most of my hours when I’m home using this computer in some way and it’s impossible to think I’d spend so much time doing one thing and wouldn’t develop emotional ties to it.

So perhaps that’s why I was so mesmerized by this song that my Ex’s portly younger brother played somewhere in the middle of downtown Bangkok. It’s called “My Computer is My Best Friend”, and while I didn’t have to be extensively convinced of that on his behalf, it also hammered home how much that’s been true for me also. I have human best friends, but none who know so many of my secrets as this computer. Nothing makes me angrier, yet I rely on nothing as much. All the traits of what we humans call “friendship” shipped and packed into a shiny box. I’ll admit, it’d been a fine surrogate for the friends I’m not sure I would have had anyway, but like it or not isolation’s been a large part of my upbringing.

So maybe that’s why whenever my computer is “acting up” I feel the need to fix it, to repair it as a mother would a son’s broken leg. And when my efforts fail, and I am back on the floor, sitting long-ways on my side staring into the abyss of boards and wires not knowing how to give this fucking thing life, that song pops back into my head and begins singing itself over and over again. But this time it’s different. “My Computer is my Best Friend” doesn’t have the simple melody that my Ex’s portly younger brother played on his little piano, this time is has a haunting waft to it not unlike A Nightmare on Elm Street’s schoolyard-chant. The computer, from it’s off position, is taunting me, and I can feel it in my blood. It is in these moments that I wish I didn’t have so much invested in these machines. It is in this moment that I wish I could have caught the goddamn football and liked it, wished that I’d prefer my days be spent working among other living humans and free-time spent checking scores or hang-gliding or some shit. I envy the portability of the luddite, their ability to actually live as Buddha did, without jpgs and upgrades. It is in these moments that I am back on the streets of Thailand, unable to speak Thai as the world I’ve immersed myself in becomes as alien and untouchable as a dead socket.

And then I fix my computer, and the second it works, my pathos disappears like a screensaver. Like two lovers meeting at the doorstep after a fight, we find a common ground in its operation, this computer and I. I exhale and feel less guilty about my broken pinky finger, smashed while clumsily trying to catch a football. With my monitor aglow I am back in Shangri-la, for a little while at least, and can allow my rage to dim into a cool buzz. And each time I tell myself the same thing – that I mustn’t adhere my happiness to the data stored on my friends spinning discs. It’s unhealthy to view these ones and zeros as the physical manifestation of all my efforts as a human – they are not indestructible and thus will one day be destructed, and because of this, I must let them go.

Or just make a backup and lobotomize the fucker.

That’ll show it.

I'm Out [send]

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In the future you won't have to say "I'm divorcing you because you're a laughingstock parody of of a leech" in person.

Just do it in text.

Someone's Son

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I placed the remote with a very deliberate plunk and in this moment I saw my father’s hand, not mine, setting it down.

It is in these moments that I feel most like someone’s son.