The Mac Mini died a while back. It was never right. If it had been a baby squirrel, it would have been pushed out of the nest. Only four years was it with me: if I had wanted a computer with a fruit-fly lifespan, I would have bought a Bill "666" Gates machine. This is the first Apple computer that has failed me, and I have been buying them since they were born. I blame Steve Jobs. Everything was fine, until his pancreas went wrong; he fought the good fight, but then he went to the boneyard. Doctors have a great Hate for the pancreas, because it is so poorly constructed, and yet so necessary. And when it goes sideways, it is really hard to fix. A lot of the parts of the humans, they are built safe and sane. But not the pancreas. Like the dead Mac Mini, if the pancreas were a baby squirrel, it would be pushed out of the nest. And if you were in medical school, and in Anatomy class you designed something like a pancreas, you would get an F. The counselor would invite you into her office, and there she would suggest you transfer to trade school, take up automobiles, and specialize in designing gaskets, since you seem to be so interested in things that are stupid and will Fail.

So I was thrown back on the old Mac Mini, a good and faithful servant for well over a decade. I abandoned it only because it was itself abandoned: everyone stopped supporting it, including Apple. It is a “pre-Intel chip” computer, and for reasons that passeth my understanding, everyone became so fascinated with this Intel chip they decided that all the old Macs without it should just be left to die by the side of the road. All the browsers bailed, one by one, until I was left with this thing called TenFourFox, a Firefox knockoff maintained by anti-Intel-chip luddites. But the day came when even that was as slow as a 666 computer at top speed; then some money showed up, so I broke down and bought a new Mac Mini. Which proved to be a pancreas machine.

Of course, the tubes have raced babblingly on over the past four years, and so this old computer is even less equipped now to deal with them than when I retired it. It is astounding the number of tubes to which I simply have no access. Others assume I am using some antique mobile system, probably from the days of Alexander Graham Bell, and so direct me to pages so minimalist they make Drudge seem baroque. Among the sites that have decided I no longer exist are Ooma and my credit union. But this I can manage. I can track my monies with pen and paper, balancing as I go, like a 20th Century human. It's not like I'm sitting on a midas pile, wondering what portraits to purchase from the Louvre, and which yacht this month should receive new teak. And as for the phone, if somebody calls, and I am not here to hear it, well, if it’s really important, they’ll call back.

Thus I enter an era of “phone composting,” akin to the mail-composting system devised by my friend Mike the lawyer, when he served as executive director of Legal Services Of Northern California, an outfit dedicated to the communism that even poor people should get to have a lawyer in civil cases. In this job, he became so maddened by the mail that daily deluged his desk, he started just heaving it in the corner. Unopened, unexamined. His theory was that if there was anything really important in there, he would learn of it by other means. And he was right. Every six months or so he would go through the mail compost, and always then learn that, yes, he had missed nothing essential at all. Other people thought this not Normal, especially when the compost neared the six-month mark, and the mail towered there in the corner like something out of Babel. But so what? His system worked.

I can still on this aged Ancient Mariner machine craft briefs for the lawyers, which is good, because that means I will not go full hobo, and have to move in under a railroad bridge, where Steve Bannon keeps everyone awake at night, as he sits around the sterno can plucking the one-string banjo and moaning songs about the globalists. What I cannot do on the Ancient Mariner is access the legal research site from which I pluck gasbaggings and blowhardings wheezed forth by men in robes, often long dead, to buttress our arguments that the clients should not go into the prison. Like the credit union and the Oomoids, Lexis Legal refuses to acknowledge the existence of the Ancient Mariner. This is Bad and Wrong, because it means I may have to go down to a law office, to there enter it. And those offices have 666 machines. Worse, if that is possible, is that I pushed all my life to work from home, and in this millennium achieved that, but now, because of the Failure of the pancreas machine, I am thrust into a Michael Corleone moment: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

Which is why I relied on the kindness of strangers who urged me to borrow an Acer variant of a Chromebook, which is apparently a giant tube connected to the cloud, one that allowed me access to the Lexis law tube. I had never browsed on Chrome before, and the first thing I noticed was that it is stupid and paranoid. Any site that has anything to do with money—the credit union, power and phone behemoths, etc.—it screeched was "insecure," and refused to allow me to go there. Probably there is some workaround, but before I could find one the woman who loaned me the Acer, back at her ranch, her primary computer, a 666 machine, suffered a 666 experience, and began coughing up blood all over her desktop, and so she must needs retrieve the Acer.

When the pancreas machine died, I was told that for a couple hundred dollars I could buy a 666 machine. Which is true. It is equally true I could shoot myself in the stomach. With a 666 machine, I would just sit here all day screaming till my lips bled, as the malware and the bots and the Rooskis streamed in, Windows and Word rhythmically crashed, and officious little notices endlessly popped onto the screen to inform me of other Problems and Failures. No. Anything but that. Even on its worst day, the pancreas Mac never subjected me to such horror. It is inevitable, if forced to grapple full-time with a 666 machine, that in my own personal hardware there would occur some “catastrophic system failure” . . . and then someone would move into this house who wouldn’t understand about the plants and the animals. So no. I will not be going there.

What I mostly can’t do any longer, on the Ancient Mariner machine, is obsessively cruise the news tubes. But I have decided that is good for me. For the news tubes, these days, are basically a Dante inferno. And why would I want to subject myself to that? There’s something masochistic about it. I might as well slowly walk the periphery of the property, lashing myself on the back with a knotty little whip, like some medieval flagellant. The night The Hairball was elected president, I vowed to remain away from all news tubes, until such time as he evaporated. The Americans had just demonstrated they were too stupid, not to mention cruel, to even have a country, and I knew it would be some time before they would be ready to admit that, and start cleaning up after themselves. In the meantime, stretching endlessly, would be a rerun of Nixontime—history repeating as farce—with boundless iterations of "I am not a crook," from a man guilty as original sin, as the sycophants in Congress, and the true believers of the tribe, hailed him with hosannas. I had already seen this movie. Why, in real time, live through that again? And yet, like a flagellant who just can’t leave off the whip, I returned to the news tubes. Too impatient, to wait for the arriving of the end. For I know how this remake will end. He will snap crackle pop in the electric chair. The people will laugh and dance and sing. His remains will be fed to pigs. It’s just a matter of waiting, for the time, to catch up.

In the fullness of time, it developed that the kindness of strangers, did not want me off the news tubes, or unplugged from the Messenger. And so that is why I am typing this—yes, Virginia, I went there—on a 666 machine. A laptop thing called Asus, a perfectly absurd name, because of course it is really Anus. The most interesting thing about it is how easily the keys detach when I lift a cat off it. The first to go in a cat claw was the "P," which was not much of a problem, because not a lot of the words want a "P." But the next to go was the "N"; I now understand that pretty much all of the words want to have an "N." The keys will not go back on, once they are detached, and so to make the letters appear on the screen, one must firmly depress some little 666 stub that lies beneath the keys. Laptops will never work out here, because these cats need to be involved in everything I do, and they figure with the laptop I must be playing with it, and although it seems pretty stupid and boring to them, they try to play with it too. In doing so, they are constantly depressing keys that cause strange and unusual things to happen; to get out of whatever Wonderland they have plunged me into, I have to shut off the Anus, which is fine, because in the normal course of things it suddenly freezes for No Reason every 90 minutes or so and has to be unplugged before it will agree again to Work.

In the meantime a constant stream of 666 messages gongs in the corner; I pay no attention to them whatsoever, just shove them off the screen without looking at them; maybe they say "you have won a pot of gold, click here!" but I will never Know. I had never been to Microsoft Explorer, which I guess is called "Edge" now, so I did that once, and was amazed: I didn't think it was possible for anything to be as aggressively ugly as reddit, but trust Gates to go there. Just for fun, I tried to download Safari: instantly klaxons and sirens went off, smoke rose from the machine, and a message appeared full-screen stating that if I did not leave off the Safari within thirty seconds, a heat-ray would emanate from the Anus that would erase my forebrain and transform me into a Hairball cultist.

Bill Gates, he is so completely a baby squirrel, shoved out of the nest. Parent squirrels seem to know when an offspring is weak and/or malformed, and so sometimes give them the heave-ho, right out of the tree. Bill Gates, if a squirrel, he would constantly be hurtling down out of the tree. I was once informed by a Scientist that throughout the first 140,000 years or so of human history Bill Gates had no skills valuable to the tribe and so he was always roasted on a spit and pounded into blocks of human rendang that could be consumed if and when things got really dire. And that only in this generation were his skills able to emerge, and so keep him off the spit. But I think that's debatable. He might have been better off on the spit this time around too.

Faceborg is very strange, there on the Ancient Mariner time machine. The photos are the size of a barn, while the text trails on for only three or four words, and then gets tired, and wants you to click “more.” But Faceborg has never been about text. Zuckerborg designed it to get women, and visuals more served that need: he devised it so women would post their pictures thereon, and maybe thereby he would get one. Zuckerborg is a sad little man; also a baby squirrel, pushed out of the nest. I think on Faceborg on the Ancient Mariner I am on some stone age mobile feed: Twitler frankly tells me so; Faceborg says nothing. Zuckerborg is all about telling you nothing, while extracting from you everything. That is his Way.

I avoided Faceborg for many years, but then I fell in with a bunch of young people, who are totally borged into the platform; all conversations are studded with "it's on my Faceborg"; "did you see what I put on the Faceborg?"; "over here on the Faceborg"; etc. They also want to talk on the Messenger, all day, and all of the night. The latter is why I had to go to the Anus: because the Ancient Mariner, it will not Messenger. To get on the Faceborg I created another version of myself, completely walled off from all the others, and with it entered the entity. And was immediately plunged back into the 20th Century. Zuckerborg permits but one link in each post, and if you post a link, you cannot post pictures, or vice versa. Because he does not own YouTube, he has a great Hate for it, and so if you post a video from there, it will appear the size of a thimble. There is no variation in the text: no italics, no bold, no centering, no indents, no nothing.

What there is, and everywhere, are cats, and babies, and complete and total nonsense, like the bloodcurdling Lie bomb about "the caravan" posted this week by the vicious nasty racist Mrs. Uncle Thomas, wife of the perjurious sexual predator Justice Uncle Thomas. Humans want to be bone-ignorant, and swaddled in Lies, and Faceborg helps them go there. And stay there. Zuckerborg doesn't care, not really. Faceborg made him richer than god, and also got him a woman. And that's what he wanted. He was just another Leroy, pining for a place to put his penis. Now he has one. Of course, his life is young, and so whether he can retain, what he has attained, that is another question. We shall see.

I was amused to discover that as soon as I joined Faceborg it began dying. All my life I have been a Jonah in the jobs: in whatever field I enter, it immediately begins going down for the third time. From the libraries to the journalism to now even the law: well over half the sort of cases I worked on when I first entered the law, they are no longer cases, because the behaviors involved, they are no longer classified as crimes. Which is Good. So, too, with the Faceborg. Once I boarded the thing, every day sprang a new leak, from the soon-seriously listing Faceborg barge, involving somebody hacking this, or stealing that, and Zuckerborg now spends his days trotting the globe to appear before various governmental bodies, to hang his head and say he's Sorry, and will Do Better. I built that, with my Jonah effect. The various calamities that have lately afflicted his enterprise, these were inevitable, for his platform was born in hackery, mendacity, theft, avarice, cruelty, and betrayal. And, as they say, what goes around, comes around.

Just as the very tubes themselves, they are the work of the truly insane: a system designed for after-apocalypse use by those who had crisped the globe with nuclear fire. So, a lot to work out there, too. Still.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyUjbBViAGE]