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Untethered

Finding yourself without a computer makes you strangely giddy, untethered, though any normal person would feel frantic at the potential of losing three novels, countless other writings, and years of photos. Instead, you danced in the kitchen this morning. You canned tomatoes. You renewed your acquaintance with your drawing pencils. You made muffins.

You feel seventeen again.

Perhaps because when you were seventeen, people didn't have computers. Well, some people did, but there was no email, no internet, no Facebook, no time wasters. You couldn't read someone's blog from Tennessee, because there were no blogs. No vlogs, no podcasts, no technobabble.

In fact, there was not much babble of any kind in your life yet, either. You hadn't started writing fiction.

Now, without a computer, you cannot work. You are on an enforced vacation.

The computer shop said they might have the computer for as long as six days. The bad news is that it might be kaput. The good news is that at least the important stuff is backed up.

Maybe tomorrow you'll slide down the bannister. Or make a cheesecake. Or read a book from cover to cover. Or paint your toenails. Or do any number of things you did as a seventeen-year old.

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