I never could, and still never do
The other day I was presented with a 250 gigabyte firewire hard drive containing the data that was recovered from my nuked computer. When I plugged in the drive, I was reminded of one of my first jobs.At 15 I was hired by St. John's Hospital in Lowell to work in its housekeeping department. It wasn't a bad job. I made three bucks above minimum wage, and minimum wage was what I made at McDonald's, so it was a step up. My job was collecting trash.
I would walk around the various floors of the hospital trailing a huge rolling trash bin. At intervals I would take the bin down to the compactor in the bowels of the hospital. I guess I can admit now that I spent about three hours every shift reading used books that I would buy on the way to work. One of my supervisors, Henry Fanion, caught me reading "The Age of Jackson" and wrote me up. I think he's dead now. I know Andrew Jackson is.
One of my stops in the hospital was the operating room. I would pick up the red biohazard bags containing amputated limbs and take them down to the incinerator, the blue chimney of which still towers above the Concord River in Lowell. Sometimes the red bags would be sloshing full of blood, gristle, and bone fragments. McDonalds had prepared me well.
It was at St. John's hospital that I stopped breathing through my nose, for obvious reasons. That is why I often talk like an obscene phone caller to this day.
Anyway, my hard drive reminded me of a red biohazard bag full of unconstituted carnage.
As I predicted, most of my files no longer have names. Pictured are a few of the 7,000 music files that I have to rename from a series of numbers. One of them is "Yellow Submarine" and right next to it is "Another Brick in the Wall (part I)". There is no reason for them to be next to each other. I feel the same way about summer music tours that have Bryan Adams and Def Leppard on the same bill. When they were current bands, their fans were not the same. In my school, the Def Leppard kids hated the Bryan Adams kids on principle. Especially before "Pyromania".
The things that survived intact were, for some reason, The Pretenders' Greatest Hits and two Aphex Twin songs. In addition, I have every picture of my daughter with the filename preserved. What do the Pretenders and Aphex Twin have in common with my daughter? I do not know.All of my scripts, invoices, articles, short stories, etc. need to be opened manually and renamed, as do several thousand photos. Of the hundreds of folders, a picture from 1998 might be sittting next to something I took last month, or an invoice or mail archive from before I moved to California might be in the same folder as a script or a web page.
I am reacquainting myself with my life this way. The records reveal that I was a fascinating person.
My computer is still gone, but I am renting one for now, which allows me to stay up late and put things back together slowly. It won't take as long as New Orleans.
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by Marty Barrett at Wednesday, April 26, 2006
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