Fear the Crab

This morning I found some… thing, on my truck. It was on the hood, and it looked like some kind of raw hamburger, but not quite raw hamburger. It looked like it was chewed-up raw hamburger. It was a very startling sight to see first thing in the morning, but unfortunately I had no time to contemplate its universal significance because I was late for work.

So I simply shot it off my truck with the water hose. It came off easily enough, and broke apart into tiny little pieces, much like how raw hamburger would, I guess. Yet there was something else strange, for in addition to the little pieces that fell to the ground after I sprayed off my truck, was this dark, bumpy thing that looked like a link sausage. Or was it shit? I have no fuckin’ clue, and that made me stand there and stare at it.

I wasn’t about to touch it, no way. If it were a link sausage, it certainly looked strange, like it was a burnt, mutated link sausage. And what was it doing mixed in with the rest of the pink stuff? If it were a sewer log, what the fuck? And what the hell is the pink stuff?

Then I got to thinking, when and where did my truck mysteriously acquire the new hood ornament? I tried to think if it happened while I was at Maile’s house last night, but I don’t quite remember because I can’t recall if I looked at the hood of the truck when I left. The amount of.. matter.. that was on the hood seemed big enough that if I were driving I’d notice it, but I don’t remember that, either. It was dark, though, so perhaps I just couldn’t see it. So if it wasn’t last night, it must have been at my house, while I was sleeping.

How? The question of how it got there eludes me, though I have some hypotheses. One could be that it was a cat. A cat that.. maybe.. took a dump on my truck, then puked. Or puked then dumped. Or maybe the pink stuff was in the dump. Or some cat that was eating raw hamburger and a link sausage on my truck. Another hypothesis is that there’s a weirdo wandering around the neighborhood eating raw hamburger and link sausage on people’s automobiles. I don’t want to consider the hypothesis of a weirdo puking and dumping. If it happened at my house, that’s scary. If it happened at Maile’s house, that’s scary, although it’s Waipahu, so it’s not that strange. Scary, but not strange.

What disturbs me is not the question of when, where or how, but why. What possible reason could there be for some pink crap with some thing that looks like crap be on my truck? If I didn’t have to work today, I’d investigate further. But I won’t get home until later, and by then I think it will be gone. If it was food, at least.

I was playing left field for some baseball team, and I think I was back in little league. But it was a strange little league because we were using a ball that was about half the size of a regular softball, yet still larger than a regular baseball. I was wearing a white uniform with blue trim, and after our warm-ups on the field we had some kind of pre-game ceremony where they play the national anthem. They unfurled this huge fan-shaped flag and all of us on the field were required to hold our portion of it. So since the flag was shaped like a baseball field, I had to hold the left corner. I kept thinking this was probably the stupidest thing I had ever done on a baseball field.

When it (the pre-game show) was over, we all retired to the dugout, which was some kind of wooden shack, almost like a tool shed. Only now we weren’t in our uniforms, and everyone sat around in regular clothes. It was almost like we were done playing, the way we hung out, drank soda and juice (as is the wont of little leaguers).

I got bored, so I left the shed and walked around, and I saw my co-workers from The Lab. I was very surprised to see them, because they were probably the last people I expected to see at my baseball game. Then I figured that if they were there, Maile was there, too. So I started looking for her.

I ended up at an extravagant mansion that was actually right next door to the tool shed. And my extravagant I mean it was posh, with wide open spaces and impeccable taste. And it was clean. There were a lot of people there, and I felt that they were all involved in the baseball game somehow, but I couldn’t figure out what their involvement was. Perhaps the parents of one of the players owned the house. Perhaps it was the league. I don’t know.

I began to feel very uncomfortable at that house, so I left and tried to find my way back to the tool shed, to be with people of my own tax bracket. I heard someone call my name, and it was Maile. She was very happy, to the point of tears, and when I asked her why she gave me this small device that looked like a miniature shoe horn, but it was some kind of recording device. She played the message on there, and while I couldn’t make out all the words, she had apparently received a gift in the form of a brand new car. We had to drive out to the place to pick it up, so we hopped into her car and she drove.

The area was very unfamiliar to us, and we kept getting lost. At some point we both realized that we needed to bring along one of those rubbery fishing lures and.. something else. So we had to find a place that sold them. We kept driving, looking around for either the place we had to get to, or a store that sold bait.

What stood out to me was that I was getting very frustrated, because Maile was not following the rules of the road. Not staying in the lane, speeding around corners, stuff like that. We finally decided to park, and walk around. Except now I had to sit in a wheelchair, apparently I had some kind of injury. So Maile would push me around, and I’d try to help by wheeling myself at times, while we looked for fishing lures.

What was odd was that at several points I found myself standing next to her, and thinking that I probably shouldn’t leave my wheelchair out where someone could steal it. We had just been given directions to a store that sold what we needed, but when we left, Maile decided to stop searching and go home. It looked late, nighttime, and it would be a while before we got to the store and to wherever we were supposed to receive the car.

We never did find the car.

The last couple of weeks have been a fucking hell. Not just any kind of hell, a fucking hell, with no protection. And it was all my fault, so that’s why I’m bitter, because I could have prevented it had I exercised a bit more caution, or more appropriately, anal retentiveness.

First it was discovered at the end of March that I had misplaced all my W-2s for the 2003 work year, plus the Form 1099-INTs that the banks send out with all the interest accumulated. I don’t know how I misplaced it, all I know is that it was all together with the Federal 1040 forms and then it disappeared. It used to be on the dining room table, but then my dad says he told me to take it back and hold onto it until he was ready to process them. Unfortunately, I don’t remember if I did take it back or if I left it on the table. So I turn my room inside out, looking through stacks of loose papers and books and other knick-knacks. I look through my old files, my old folders, the closet, my brother’s room, his closet, all the folders and files and books and binders and shelves and even under the bed. Nada.

So I had to do the next best thing. I had to call up all my employers and ask for copies of W-2s. The Office and The Lab were pretty easy, since it seems I’m not the first to lose a W-2, so they had copies readily available. DFS was a bit more stressful, because I had to call the main office in San Francisco to request a W-2, only to discover that I needed to fax my request in. So I had to wait. I didn’t know how long it would take, so I began preparations to file for an extension.

While this was happening, my laptop died. I mean it died. The hard drive failed, I think for a possible number of reasons. I’d been using the laptop every day for the past 2 years, so perhaps it was its time. Laptops are notorious for placing hard drives next to CPUs, so perhaps the high heat output negatively affected the disks. I was downloading and installing Visual Studio .NET (a legitimate copy from school), and I had forgotten to defragment my hard drive prior to that, so perhaps the disk wrote into some bad sectors, and upon boot it failed to read. So many reasons, or perhaps all of them, contributed to my laptop dying.

Ordinarily it wouldn’t be too bad. Unfortunately, the laptop crash occured at a crucial moment in my school life. I use my laptop to do my assignments, where I download applicable software to run my programming assignments. The crash meant that I no longer had a computer to program, and I wasn’t about to try to dload and possibly corrupt my desktop. So I had to scramble around trying to find someone else who either had the software I was using, or was willing to let me install it temporarily.

Needless to say, it’s been a stressful two weeks.

However, at the end of the two weeks, things worked out. The W-2s came in fast, allowing me to file in time and avoid having to submit an extension. Getting a new hard drive was simple, I just had to go to ByteWare and buy one. My professor offered his computer for me to test my programs on, so that went well.

Repairing my computer was a trial. It was the first time I had ever done something to a computer that involved the hard drive, so I didn’t know what to expect. Taking out the old hard drive was deceptively simple, so simple that at first I was trying to do it the hard way. I tried to remove the disks through the keyboard, when in fact all I had to do was open up a side panel and slide the carriage out. Pop the new disk in, and prepare to partition, format and install the OS.

Partitioning was easy. Formatting was easy, albeit long. But installing the OS was tedious. I heard from a reputable source that I couldn’t use my recovery CD that I got from Dell that came with the laptop. So I pulled a copy of WinXP from one of my friends, used the product key, and installed the OS. Then of course, I had to install all the patches, especially Service Pack 1. But after I downloaded it from the update site, it told me that the product key I had was invalid. Apparently MS put in checks to ensure that only legal copies can update their software, by comparing the product key to a known list of copies or pirated versions. So this meant I had a working copy of XP pro, but I couldn’t install any of the security patches needed to cover up the many holes.

I then discovered that my “reputable source” was an idiot. My recovery CD has a legal copy of WinXP Pro specifically for my laptop, and restores it to factory specs. I didn’t even have to enter the product key. But I had to delete the partition, reformat the hard drive and reinstall the OS. I had to do this three times. The first time, I saw the message about the bad key. The second time, I figured maybe I entered the key wrong, so I reinstalled, and that didn’t work. The third time was the final, after my enlightenment by more wizened members of the computer community.

Updates were a cinch, although long, since I had a lot to catch up on. I also didn’t want to install them all at once, because sometimes that has nasty side effects. So I was downloading them one by one, installing each after I got them, and rebooting my computer. Took forever. I spent the whole day getting my laptop back on track.

And then I had to reinstall all the programs and files that I had accumulated over the past 2 years. This was a bit easy, and I cannot stress the importance of regular backups. Had I not saved many of my files to CD, I’d be lost. I suppose if there’s nothing important on the computer, backups aren’t necessary. Like I said, though, I use my laptop for my assignments, and I’ve started to make it a practice to save each one to disk for later retrieval, or as it so happened, in the event of a hard drive head crash. Even on my desktop, I’ve saved photos of friends, stuff that I wrote, even certain legal downloaded applications like ZoneAlarm and virus scanners (only because it’s a bitch to search the web to find them again). I’ve thought about saving stuff like the web pages I created, but if RoadRunner’s servers ever crash, it might be an opportunity to simply remake my web page from scratch. I don’t know. Jury’s still out on that one.

Anyway, I just finished getting my laptop back to “normal” level. It’s not quite the same as when I first got it, but that’s good, because after this reinstall, I only have the programs I want on there, not all the bundled software that usually comes out of the box. In fact, I should have done that for my desktop. It’s not too late to try, although it’d take a couple of days to backup current files and reformat/reinstall the discs. I need to check what reinstallation discs I have, though. Don’t want to start formatting and find out I don’t have that DVD player software anymore.

This morning I dreamt that I had a 10-inch fat centipede in my shoe, while my foot was still in it. I felt something inside, so I took my shoe off and emptied it, and this monster of a centipede fell out. It was dead, according to my dream, so I had no fear of being bit, but it was a disturbing sight and I felt very… uncomfortable. Chills and goosebumps, that sort of thing.