The problem is that the computer just doesn’t cut it. I bought it second hand on impulse from E-bay. At the time I was doing that a lot. I’ve got a film camera here I bought around the same time when the damn things were more or less being written off as obsolete. Ok, so yesterday I was walking into town with my students along the canal looking out over the abandoned warehouses and factories and thinking how I should go in and take photographs for my story Collateral Damage, a story, thinking about it, which I wrote on a second typewriter I bought from E-bay and had delivered to my work, but that won’t happen, it’s just another plan to add to the thousands I already don’t have time for.
[Reverie of hancuffing myself to the gates of the Maudsley ADHD clinic where I want to get referred, of becoming restless, of course, and demonstrating my ADD and fidgeting in my inability to keep still.]
It was a case, as always, of throwing good money after bad. I hadn’t been able to get down and write and so I had bought a digital dictaphone, something I had obsessed over (genuinely obsessed, as will be clear if I ever find time to post some of my old Unforgiving Minutes) since I was in Prague, the same time I was spending money on language CDs and books in these discrete all-encompassing but cycling obsessions I have suffered from all my life…
[Reverie of … but it’s lost in a mess of thoughts.]
…I was dictating to this thing in the summerhouse up in the garden where on coming back from university years before I used to try and learn french by just reading parallel texts and looking up word after word. [12:25] [wanting to text somebody about my diet and the problems I am having at the moment, only bottling it. This after wanting to text Mum and Dad about needing a private consultation with a specialist but feeling trapped because I didn’t want to spoil their weekend with my brother down South in London. And this too after drafting a text to a couple of people at work that I would need a diagnosis, and to be medicated.]
Soon it began to frustrate me that though dictating might (just might) be marginally better than writing in terms of my drifting off, it necessitated long shifts of writing up. I had a backlog of dictations on the digital dictaphone, not to mention the tapes from years before, most of which were unlabelled. [12:35]
I started looking into voice recognition software, and found Ilisten for the mac. I obsessed over it for a while, and then bought it, sitting in front of my iBook trying to train it. One day, which I remember now, I was sat there training the damn thing when M____ came in saying that we had not had sex for some time, or at least strongly hinting the same. My parents may have been away at the time and she may even have been wearing some skimpy underwear as she so seldom does. I sent her away irritatedly. I so needed to complete the process.
Only, I’m getting the chronology all to cock. At some stage I discovered that I-Listen is only for the latest version of OS X and needs at least a G4. My iBook is a G3. The software had loaded up ok and even let me train it a little, but it was struggling.
Meanwhile, too, I was thinking about starting a website. I had come back to England and set to learning HTML. I was enjoying it. Before M____ came over I was making strides, and had really thrown myself into it. I had written a good few pages and linked them together. They were messy, and the code was bad, but they worked. I had played around a little with photoshop and made some photographs look aged and sepia, and attempted with some others to make them look as if they were developing in a developing bath, written a little for the pages. I was enjoying myself for once, and really getting somewhere. And so I wanted all the latest programmes to put this genius website together. A website which would have fiction and also a kind of blog like the Unforgiving minutes, and which would have photos… [16:42 having given up trying to focus on this and having been to the doctor’s for a medical for an upcoming minibus test] And so I looked into some auctions for Adobe Creative Suite on Ebay. Of course this too necessitated OS X and a G4. (I’ve just typed some text and got the Mac’s spinning beachball of death, its version of the PC’s hourglass, and I’m not happy. I’m constantly thinking of how little money I get paid, of how I have been thinking of getting a PS2 to research gaming, and how I can’t afford a new computer.) I bought a ripped-off CD of CS2 after watching a few auctions, and then, having convinced myself that I have invested money and could only get on by buying the computer which would finally see me progress with something, forked out for the Powermac G4 I’m writing on now. As I have written elsewhere, this only meant that a few months down the line I had to bid for an instalation disk for OS X so I could reset the passwords. And now I discover that this disk did not reset all of them, and the Mac forums I have consulted are recommending a full system reboot!
And so my impulsivity is getting me in trouble. Meanwhile I have been paying thirty quid a month for a mobile I barely use, tempted as I was two years ago by a phone I didn’t much like which packed up after a few months (A Motorrola RZR).
And my laptop, another Mac which I was talked into buying by a friend, which I never really got any decent software for, and certainly none of the Mac-specific software I told myself I would at some time need, and which packed up numerous times while I was in Prague, will not run the wireless dongle drivers which I had to download specifically (at my parents) for the Mac.
I’m here writing replies to the Mac forums I cannot send and going out of my mind because of the spinning beachball of death in my own mind. The simplest, shortest post takes me a whole morning to write up.