live via: my old crappy computer that's on the brink of crumbling to pieces

Somewhere in Berkeley, someone is running around with a computer full of unfinished flyers, great music, and incredibly sappy love poetry.

So it finally happened. Last night, backstage at a show, my laptop was stolen. For the most part, I handled it pretty well...I didn't go into a room to scream, or maniacally search all my friends' bags, or start crying in the middle of the venue. My over all theme of the night was, "Well, twas just a machine, and a machine is but material in this fictitious materialistic realm." (yeah, I start talking existentialist when in the presence of tragedy)

To be quite honest though, today I've been suffering a bit of a mild case of depression (can depression be diagnosed in less than 24 hours of..the sadness...starting...?) Maybe I'm just sad. It does suck that I no longer have the thing, but what has really been bumming me out is the fact that all of my personal journal entries since last July were in that machine. The stuff that never made the blogs, or stage, because they were too slurred or vulnerable or painful or written in the code of my infinite randomness. Those 3am half-innebriated spills. The desperate hustles to find the first lines to poems, the blueprints that never found themselves into the public eye. The accidental masterpieces that I probably never even read more than twice. Ironically, what I miss is all the writing that I produced during my "writer's block."

Between the months of November and January, I went through the phase of typing late at night on my computer. Before then, I could never do writing on a computer, and could never write for shit past 10pm. For the most part, I thought my writing was horrible, but I had fun doing it. I was reading a lot of Sylvia Plath at the time. In the back of my head, I thought to myself that this would be the shit that would be compiled if I ever got to the point of greatness where my bullshit writing was worth compiling. It was my secret. I left behind punchlines, incredibly dense imagery, references that no one would ever get but me, for myself.

It was during this process that I realized that a writer's block isn't the inability to write, rather it's the inability to be satisfied with what you're currently writing, because you want to be writing something else. Quite fittingly, I realized all of this just weeks ago. Most of my design projects, and music, and photographs, and things that I love much less than the writing that I thought I hated were backed up. But I never back up projects that I'm in the middle of, so I never backed up the chronicles of my life.

Really, it feels like a breakup. And one of those breakups where you're pretty sure she's not coming back. I'm dealing with the separation from a time that I was more open to myself than I've ever been, or that I am now, when I finally figured out how to write for myself and only myself.

But whatever. Q-Tip lost the first draft of Love Movement in a house fire, and he's still doing okay. Dr. Dre has all his Death Row-era beats for ransom and he's okay. And I'm pretty sure Detox is more highly-anticipated than the journal anthology I was planning to release on the 25th anniversary of my death (how's THAT for morbidity?!?).

So ultimately, all is well in the neighborhood. HOWEVER. I would greatly appreciate if you would take a second to mourn with me. Here we go, y'all, lets take it back, and pour one for all the mac-daddies that done passed away.