What I Did
by The Editor
March 14, 2009
Creel must’ve gotten to me more than I want to admit. I didn’t think I gave a shit about him, and I really didn’t. But I can’t stand to see strangers die. Not ones I know. Maybe if I’d been more estranged from my father, I would’ve been devastated when he fell off the garage roof trying to fix some tiles and broke his neck. As things happened, he died instantly and I made impolite jokes at the funeral
Recently I found a scrap of paper I must’ve written on sometime in December, January, or early February. It sounds like something that dawned on me while I was in the shower, and I copied it furiously as I dripped over a piece of paper. For some reason it needed to get out before I’d forgotten it in the haze of the day or night:
Creel’s death is to me like the sudden and unnecessary death of a bug, not brought down by fate irony or a foot, but instead by nothing at all. It just slowed down and then it stopped moving. The nothing of it and the cessation of movement haunt me every time I try to move from one side of my room to the other.
The way Creel died, what I wrote didn’t make any sense, but it must’ve had an effect on me, because I kept it, and I didn’t keep anything from that period. Not if I wrote it or edited it or approved of it. One night, when my laptop was running slow because it was updating something, I got a little angry and punched the screen. The laptop popped back a little bit and then the screen swung back on its hinges before the whole thing fell back at me and landed on the desk with a muffled clack. I checked the screen to see if I’d done any damage. None that I could notice right away, so I took a pen and drove it into the screen as best I could. Then it seemed best to turn the laptop off, and then I ran the pen down the screen until the pen burst, leaving a trail of black ink on the gray-black screen in a violent and abstract protest. The rest of the laptop was smashed repeatedly against walls and the ground until it was almost in pieces. The loose collection of pieces was thrown underneath the shower, covered in shampoo, and pissed on. The whole mess was thrown out into the cold to freeze overnight. Every backup disc was broken over my knee. Every USB drive was bent or smashed beyond recognition. I also had a portable hard drive where I stored music and backed up nearly everything I had. I was tired by then, so it was only bashed against my desk a few times, doused in the beginnings of some bottle or another, and tossed into the corner of a room.
I don’t remember much after that.
In late February I discovered the sad-looking hard drive underneath a pile of gratuitously torn clothing. I took it to a local computer store to see if I could recover some of my music. The foreign guy there ran the place on spare parts and must not have understood my specific instructions, because he tried to save everything. He left me with an archive of half-saved material I didn’t want. It was an embarrassment to me. A lot of it wasn’t complete anymore and was only available in segments that fell away into corrupt, indecipherable code. I didn’t want to bother the original writers for the full versions of what they wrote. I don’t think they would’ve sent them. I make for a poor editor, better at fiddling with people’s lives than encouraging talent. So I’ll post these fragments to the site, because I have them, as some sort of accusation. Against somebody. I don’t know.