 At a recent screening of The Godfather part II (demonstrating for my building a means of enjoying crime without participating in it or subjecting others to the consequences of it), attendees were asked to model Fredo's face during his "I'm smart - not like everybody says" speech.
As you can see by clicking here, results were varied, with one participant choosing to internalize the emotion rather than to express it outwardly.
 One would be forgiven for thinking, considering the bitching going on lately in this space, that life as we know it is bad.
That is not the case. Only certain people and institutions as we know them are bad. We are hoping they will be dealt with in the Great Reckoning.
Also, things cannot be bad when I can get "O Superman" off of YouTube.
The cruelest month, part II: My criminal neighbor
 Upon looking at the building I live in my sister, who has been known to smell of patchoulli, said that the place has bad feng shui.
"It's facing down a perpendicular street," she said.
"And the hill at the end of that street contains a graveyard," I pointed out.
"See?" she said.
"And there was a stabbing murder in the apartment downstairs before I moved in," I said.
"See?" she said.
"And the mailman can't seem to put the mail in the right box," I said.
"See?" she said.
"And my neighbor across the hall is a criminal," I said.
"See?" she said.
"And the whole neighborhood smells of cologne on old men who couldn't park their cars if the Turks were coming back to finish the job," I said.
I never thought seriously about owning a home while I lived in Massachusetts. I think that is because I had great landlords. I have yet to have a good landlord in the four places I've lived in California and that has made me wish to be a property owner myself.
My neighbors across the hall are a husband and wife in their mid-20's with a seven-year-old boy and a year-old girl. The dad is complex; he straddles several hard-to-reach demographics. He is a brain-damaged Laotian gang member/drug dealer tattoo artist who goes by the name of Solo.
"You got a white wife?" he asked me when I was moving in.
"Yes indeedy," I said.
"I do, too," he said. "So that's cool."
I'd have short conversations like this with Solo all the time because I realized he couldn't have long conversations. He would call me "neighbor" because he couldn't remember my name.
His wife is named Vanessa and she is one of those sullen, sweatpants-wearing heavy people that are popular these days. I realize that I am prejudiced against the sullen. Vanessa has never looked me in the eye.
Coming home late from an event with my camera around my neck, I would often see Solo smoking on his balcony. "You're like the Night Stalker, man," he once said.
We would often hear shouting in the house, and the son would throw tantrums evvery morning in the driveway. Solo seemed to be the face of the family but it was clear that Vanessa took care of the bills. When I would work late at night I would hear peeople coming and going every few minutes. I didn't stand by the door, but I was confident that the Solo family wasn't selling Girl Scout cookies.
If so, I would have bought some.
It was my downstairs neighbor, Ian, whose apartment is haunted, who had an issue with Solo. One night the Solo family was having a party and playing the music loud. Ian went upstairs, banged on the door (which was the only way he cpould have been heard from inside) and said, "We're not living in a dorm."
This was the wrong thing to say to Solo, because he took advantage of the opportunity to make the issue about class structure rather than him playing Hip Hop Hits from Today and Back in the Day so loudly that corpses were shook loose down the street.
I joined the gentlemen on the landing as Solo was saying, "well, maybe you think you're better than me because I didn't go to college, but - "
He turned his music down in a face-saving gesture that he was being oppressed.
About a week later, his brother came to stay with the family. His brother I will call Unreconstructed Solo because he never introduced himself.
Solo's brother made Solo look upstanding. With no wife or children to modify his behavior, Unreconstructed Solo made our four-unit complex seeem a little like the junior high smoking area for a few weeks. It was like some retarded people were expertly made up to look like the Eastside Crips.
The story we tell ourselves now, because we will never know for sure, goes like this: a couple of weeks ago Vanessa got fed up with her husband and his brother and took the kids back to her mother's house. Solo and Unreconstructed Solo took this opportunity to go on a several-days'-long meth binge. I saw Solo in the morning during this period, looking as if the Sun was somehow assaulting him.
On Friday night, April 7 (two days after I bought a new car and five days after my computer died), TAARG was at a theater function and I had just put ACI to bed. I turned on the projector, got my notebook, and started watching a DVD of questionable legitimacy to review it. The DVD was called No Morals.
A few minutes in, the phone rang. It was Ian.
"Martin, are you OK?" he asked. I wondered for a second if he was judging me.
"Yes," I said.
"Have you noticed the seven police cars parked outside of our house?" he asked.
"As a matter of fact, I haven't," I said. I stood up and went to the window. Indeed there were several police cars outside, and now some policemen were looking up at me!
"Mind if I come up?" he asked.
"I'll get some drinks ready," I said.
Ian arrived and told me that he'd heard yelling from the balcony of my floor, along the lines of "There's nobody here!" That had been Solo and I had been putting my daughter to bed so I hadn't heard it.
I called the non-emergency number of the police and asked the friendly dispatcher if I should be concerned that there were police surrounding my house.
"No," he said. "There was an incident down the street from you."
The bad feng shui street.
This turned out to be both true and false, because attention was clearly being paid to my house. We heard our other neighbors being questioned by the police if their children had ever had any trouble with the law.
I still had to work, so I turned the movie on, taking notes as the police talked to eacch other via radio on the street and an LAPD helicopter circled overhead.
"When people back home ask me how Billerica is different from L.A.," Ian said, "I can point to watching a porn movie while cops surround the house and a police helicopteer shines a light in my window.
"I'm going out there," he said.
"Not a good idea," I said. "But have a good time."
I an walked outside and was immediately told to raise his hands by the police. He joined several other neighbors staring at our house from the street, and none of whom were allowed to go back in.
TAARG arrived back in the neighborhood around this time, but was not allowed to enter the house. We communicated by cellphone.
She and Ian were able to ascertain that someone fitting the description of Solo's brother emerged from our building earlier that evening, ran across the street, and assaulted an elderly neighbor, who dropped his wallet but also managed to knock down Unreconstructed Solo, who took the money and fled.
After yelling "There's nobody here," Solo, too, fled, through his apartment, out the back door, and probably over a low wall into a cul-de-sac area from which he could escape to some side streets. This was before cops with guns started crouching behind the house, too.
 But the police still thought the culprit was on the premises, so they sent up a team with a battering ram and a dog. ACI slept through them knocking the door in, checking the attic, and standing around loudly discussing what to do next.
Ian and TAARG were let back in the building after a few hours. The police alerted our property owners of the charges, the unfortunate knocking down of the door, and of a threatening message Solo left on Ian's machinee later ("I'm having a party tonight with loud music, hookers, drugs, and guns," Solo said on the recording, which the police got a copy of. "I dare you to come." Classy), but the property owners never returned any of our calls.
Things seem back to normal. In fact, the rent has gone up. A new coat of paint has been splashed on the house, palm trees, flowers, and turf have been laid out around the perimeter. The pipes still don't work all the time, but that is something that can't be seen from outside.
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.
The cruelest month, part 1
 On April 2, my computer's hard drive melted down, taking with it an external hard drive and all the data on both. Since the utility I'd been employing to diagnose my computer's minor ills was supplied by Apple Computer as part of its subscriber-only Protection Program, I thought it fitting that Apple should do its utmost to fix the problem.
Thus began a crazy joyride of bad to satisfactory to contradictory customer service that isn't yet done, but I thought I should post something because people have been asking if I was dead.
At issue for me, and indeed for America, is Volume Structure. Micromat's TechTool utility, which is provided with a subscription to Apple's AppleCare Protection Plan, is a low-rent Norton Utilities which often as not only diagnoses problems rather than fixes them, I used TechTool when my otherwise-healthy PowerBook was having trouble recognizing a firewire hard drive.
On the hard drive was the most recent backup of all my pictures, documents, and music. I had loaned the drive to a client who had stepped on the power cord and shorted it. I got a new power cord but the drive was still having trouble spinning up. I thought that the short might have corrupted the file system but I was not worried. At worst, I thought, I would just format it and immediately back up my PowerBook again. In addition, I had several DVDs of my work, but none more recent than three months ago.
TechTool found a problem with the volume structure of my PowerBook after it, too, could not recognize the external hard drive. It suggested I fix it by pressing "Fix". I did.
In two minutes everything was gone.
Restarting my computer I was greeted with "kernel panics", which resemble a curtain coming down on the desktop rather than a healthy smattering of files, folders, and screen savers. I was not worried.
After an hour of attempting to boot up the computer with various CDs, I started worrying. TAARG asked when I might be ready to leave for the afternoon. I told her I couldn't. I felt my stomach sinking.
In 1989 I had returned from school to find my car in the process of being stolen from an Osco parking lot in Winthrop, MA. The thieves threw a screwdriver (a Phillips, it turned out) at me as they drove away in my Pontiac 6000 (later recovered in Quincy). In the trunk was everything I had written for the past three years on computer disks and yellow legal pads. It was all in a very handsome case. The case was never recovered. I felt a kinship to 1989 every time I watched that curtain drop.
I walked over to TAARG's PC and sat down. I began searching for "TechTool" and "kernel panic" and immediately retrieved hundreds of articles. The same issue had snared many people before. When I upgraded my operating system from 10.3 to 10.4 (Panther to Tiger), TechTool went from relatively benign and useless to dangerous.
I thought I'd go down to my local Apple Store and request the updated version of TechTool, the one that didn't destroy computers.
I went to the store at the Glendale Galleria. It was Sunday afternoon and crowded. I approached a sullen Mac Genius in the back and explained my issue.
If you are not familiar with Apple stores, they are all laid out similarly, except for a couple of variations in prime real estate, like The Grove in Los Angeles and in Manhattan. In the back is an area called the Genius Bar, where people reserve time to ask questions or get things fixed. I have never been unsatisfied with a Genius Bar visit.
Maybe because I have been employed off and on for the past 10 years as a help desk technician, call center representative, IT Director, computer consultant, software instructor, web designer, database developer, etc., I usually know the right questions to ask any lowly help desk representative. They deal with stupid questions from people who should have read the manual all day long. I pride myself on not wasting anyone's time.
I approached Marc, a morose 20-something Mac Genius, and explained that I wanted an updated version of TechTool because the previous one had just toasted my hard drive. He replied that they were on sale a few aisles away.
"Why should I have to pay for it?" I asked pleasantly.
"Why should you not pay for it?' he replied, not looking at me.
In the ten years I have performed the duties listed a few paragraphs up, I concluded later, I have purchased, authorized the purchase, or recommended the purchase of over half a million dollars of Apple merchandise for schools, entertainment companies, medical institutions (which was a stretch) and individuals. I didn't think that this obligated Apple in any way to be nicer to me, but I immediately regretted having done it.
"Think of it this way," I said slowly, not wanting to embarrass him at his job. "Apple provides one piece of software along with its $300 extended warranty program. I use that piece of software in good faith with the reasonable belief that it will fix my computer rather than destroy it. It toasts my hard drive. Now you're saying I have to buy the updated copy? You should provide it for free."
"I can't do that," he said, still not looking at me.
The not looking at me part was the unforgiveable part.
I sat down on a carpeted bench and called Apple. I explained that the Mac Genius was a Mac Retard and the person on the phone seemed sympathetic. Apparently there were issues with the Glendale store. The guy on the phone suggested a few options I might ask the Genius to try. I thanked him and hung up.
The options involved pieces of software that it was reasonable to expect would be behind the desk. One was the latest version of Apple's OS. Marc attempted to start my computer with this via a firewire had drive and the machine would not read it. The other option was a piece of software called Disk Warrior, which in some cases allows a user to rebuild damaged blocks of a hard disk. Marc said he didn't have it.
"That's not it right there?" I asked, pointing to a Disk Warrior box.
"You have to buy it," he replied.
I determined that he must not have understood that it was Apple's responsibility to undo their mistake. I had tried earlier to blame myself for following TechTool's advice to "fix" my volume, but I was now confident that if Apple had not made any effort to inform its subscribers of the catastrophic results of the utility it provided to subscribers, the company was liable.
"You don't have Norton Utilities back there?" I asked.
"I don't like Norton," he shared.
"So you suggest I buy Disk Warrior?" I asked.
"Yes," he replied. "We'll try it."
I hadn't expected to lose anything but time and gas on this issue, but I spent $109 for Disk Warrior, returned to the back of the store, and watched as it delivered the verdict in two minutes that it, too, could not fix my problem.
I was still of the opinion that my data was not irretrievably lost and that Apple would get it back. I also knew that I would probably have to re-install my applications and would need to buy a new external hard drive. Because of this, I refrained from saying, "I've lost everything".
I wasn't interested in being vindictive when there was a much larger problem to contend with. I know people for whom vindictiveness is a welcome escape from actually dealing with the problem. I knew I'd get a refund for Disk Warrrior later, but asked Marc anyway. He said No. I expected that. I didn't want to get him fired at that point, but I thought about it later, and did.
I called Apple again on the way home, and ended up speaking with someone for about three hours. Everything he suggested failed, but he copped to Apple's culpability and was distressed about my experience at the store and with a previous phone operator who had disconnected me and not taken any notes. Despite being no closer to getting my computer fixed than several hours before, I didn't want to punch anyone.
The next morning my case got bumped up to Customer Relations, and I was given a refund for Disk Warrrior and was told to bring my computer to a certified data recovery place in Burbank. I wasn't surprised that I wasn't sent back to an Apple store.
I was told by the Apple customer relations guy (his name was Zach) that Apple would take care of the $150 diagnostic fee and then I would be reimbursed for any other costs. I said OK and brought my sad PowerBook in. I haven't seen it since.
Since then I've been told over a few occasions that my data "looks good". This means that I'll have to reinstall my applications but I will need to manually rename something close to 40,000 files: 6,000 pieces of music, 30,000 pictures, and maybe 3,000 documents. At least I've been told they still exist.
The data recovery place (Melrose Mac on Olive Ave. in Burbank) then said that Apple hadn't authorized funding for the several hours of data recovery required. I said Oh Yes they did. They said Oh No they didn't. I called Zach back but he didn't return my calls.
I managed to get another Apple customer relations guy and he flatly contradicted Zach's promises. "We never pay for data recovery," the guy said. "No one pays for data recovery. We gave you $150 as a goodwill gesture because you'd had a bad experience in the Apple store. It is everyone's responsibility to backup their own data."
I didn't know what to say. Finally I asked if the call was being recorded.
"I'm not sure," the guy said.
"Maybe it should be," I said. I used words like fraudulent and unethical, "good faith" and "half a million". I said I couldn't believe Apple admitted responsibility for my computer's demise but wouldn't do anything about it. I asked how many people had Apple screwed over with this TechTool fiasco who hadn't had the sense to complain about it.
He just listened to me (to his credit), then put me on hold. He came back and offered a larger amount of money, as a special exception, for data recovery. I am now of the impression that I'll still have to pay $150 out of pocket for this. I agreed. I started thinking about the letter I'd write.
I called up Melrose Mac and explained the new deal, dimly aware that maybe I shouldn't be the one making all these calls. "You're a squeaky wheel," the technician said.
"Or something," I said.
This is not the squeakiest I've been, but I'm always sad that consumers need to make a huge effort to just get the service implicitly promised to them, whether in landlord/renter situations, with car dealers, or with elected officials.
I've been without my computer for three weeks and my output has been cut by 80 percent. I've been using my wife's computer and we both resent it. The other day, when I was expecting to get my PowerBook back, I got a call from Melrose Mac.
"Who else have you brought this to?" the guy asked.
"No one but you and Apple, about a year ago," I replied.
"Oh," he said. "There's some screws missing."
"OK," I said. "I didn't notice, but is there a problem?"
"It might have something to do with why your trackpad isn't working and this transistor is fried," he said.
"The trackpad was working before I brought it to you," I said.
"Well, it's still under warranty so we can send it to Apple," he said.
I have just about zero faith in Apple at this point, but the alternative is equally if not more depressing.
The experience has made me dubious of institutions I'd had great faith in. It's like if AAA stopped towing my car or Costco no longer provided quality Kirkland products.
I'm borrowing a Mac for the duration of my PowerBook's convalescence and pondering the cost of real-time data backups and offsite storage. I'd just prefer that my expensive computer never break, but there you go.
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At a recent screening of The Godfather part II (demonstrating for my building a means of enjoying crime without participating in it or subjecting others to the consequences of it), attendees were asked to model Fredo's face during his "I'm smart - not like everybody says" speech.
