Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Behind the walls of sleep

This happens to me constantly.  It also happens to my Mac.  I don’t entirely know what the phenomenon is called, other than “why the hell does my computer keep doing this.”  But I wrote about it in a story I was working on, so here’s my best explanation:

I opened the laptop, but it wouldn’t boot.  I didn’t know if it got zapped, or if this was one of those Windows dance of sleep things, where the computer is sleeping and you hit the power button for 1.7 seconds and not 1.9 seconds and it wakes up and asks you if you want to put it to sleep, but when you try to hit the button again, it does sleep, or it reboots, but if you hold the button for the same amount of time because you want it to reboot, it doesn’t reboot and then it asks you if you want to make it sleep, but sleep is different than suspend, because for suspend, you have to hold the button for 1.8 seconds and then not hold it for 1.6 seconds and then hold it for 1.7 seconds, or it won’t wake up and/or it will ask you if you want to suspend.

I think after I make my first million dollars, I am going to shut off all of the sleep options on my laptop, and physically remove the power button, and then hardwire the power cord into a Yamaha generator, and then pay someone to constantly add oil and gas to the generator and haul it around 20 paces behind me like guys in Saudi Arabia haul around their wives but no burka and then I will get some kind of BOSE headphone so I don’t have to hear the generator and maybe I will have to hire a second guy to constantly swap out the AA batteries in the BOSE headphones and maybe have a second set with fresh batteries so I can hot-swap them and not have to hear the generator while I’m swapping out the batteries, although that’s probably not a full-time position, so maybe I’ll get that guy to also transcribe the thousand or two spiral notebooks of hand-written garbage I’ve hand-written over the last two dozen years, provided he can read my handwriting, and good luck, because I can’t even read my own fucking handwriting at this point.

Here’s a picture of me making candles in 2002.  You probably use a similar setup when you’re making meth, which I’ve never done, but apparently the state of California thinks everyone does, because I spent twenty damn minutes trying to buy some Claritin-D at Safeway yesterday, and it probably takes less paperwork to buy dynamite.


Comments

One response to “Behind the walls of sleep”

  1. Wow. I think I'll go look for that story when I have a shitload more time on my hands, but I'll be damned if you're not the most stream-of-consciousness-blathering SOB this side of the late, lamented HST….or maybe I need to expand my reading list? Or stop being a whiny little bitch and unleash my own creative urges (as opposed to my PROcreative urges, which are mostly onanistic in nature).

    Peace,

    Julie