02.25.2004 - 4:33 p.m.

In the depths of my laptop, in a folder called "me" and next to a folder called "distractions" (containing things like monthly budgets, car insurance quotes, and career search data), is a folder called "fertilizer." In that fertilizer folder, along with files of poem forms, story prompts, and possibly-poetic lines, is a 48-page file called "entry."

It does not contain one single entry from this or any other diary. Those I cut out and paste into my diary backup files, a 200-odd-page document in a different section of the "me" folder. It does not contain any fiction or fiction-like material, either; those get moved to individual story files, or to book ideas lists, the total size of which I do not know. But it does contain every single unfinished writerly thought I've had since July 2001.

I'd been thinking that my entry file was getting too long, that there was too much stuff to turn over before you got to the good soil at the bottom. But now that my laptop is out of town, getting fixed, and my files are limited to a small pile of CDs at the top of a spindle, I miss it so much. It's not the same, looking at it, but not being able to add, rearrange, dicker around. It's not alive anymore. It's become a Document, capital D, instead of a process-on-record.

I want my laptop back, NOW.

-stonebridge

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