accouterments

08/11/2021 2 By BuddyCushman

If I were a Catholic I’d be giving my computer the last rites. As a practicing half-assed Buddhist I have concluded my computer’s ‘thusness’ is somewhere between life support and scrap heap. Folks have been telling me – my son Cameron most clearly – that things get made these days with a corporate eye to giving out sooner than later, means a good computer ought to do its thing like three maybe four years. When they hear mine must be going on eight, well, there’s an electric chuckle and a head-shaking in the direction of one clearly not in the know. With the advice it’s time to couch up some dough and go get yourself a new one, Pops.

That takes me two places. There’s the math-like place where I have convinced myself over the decades (based primarily on fact) that I have the technical skills of a praying mantis (she likely has more) and what about all the wicked important stuff I’ll lose in hands thrown-up, make-me-want-to-holler attempts to transfer what’s in the antique on which I type this very thing to a shiny new one. I’ll fail wildly. There’s that. There is also something of a default place as regards money and my history with it (or its invisible twin) and how can I possibly afford to buy a new computer when there’s this crazy rent and California gasoline price and me on my Social Security — and all that old noise.

Let me reply – to me.

Regards I ain’t the kid from “Ready Player One” and know next to nothing about nothing when it comes to computers – so what? When I think back three and four months to how much of my life I gave away – sold, donated, recycled, shredded, chucked – clearing out it and me from my ex-wife’s house, it just had to happen that way. What I told myself at the time was I was about to enter a completely new chapter and so didn’t need all the “things” and accouterments and keepsakes from the first 70-plus years. They’d served me enough. Well, it’s still true. If I lose photos and files, even if I lose unfinished stories patiently waiting on me for “The End” some five years now, so what? I probably won’t lose all that but even if I do, it’s like Thoreau said – “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”

Then the money thing. Back in 2011, I believe it was March, when I was now legal to “retire” and in a job I pretty much hated, out of the blue late one morning came a phone call from my main man Keith, over in Provincetown, MA, and hearing my thinking Keith immediately told me, “You’ve got to pray for abundance, Bro. Quit the job. Abundance – it’s everywhere. You’ll be taken care of. For sure. There’a abundance everywhere.” That conversation changed my life that day, the next two months when I did resign and retire, and since. The feel-it-and-know-it quality of abundance has remained an intrinsic piece in my life – woven through and through. It was still this morning. In April when I suddenly lost my house and was encouraged somewhat mystically to head down here to San Diego and never mind the “costs”, I had some faith. A bunch of it. I’ll be taken care of. I believed. And – you’ve read it here before – folks from my all through my life came back to help me on down this new road. Some gave money. Enough money, even, to buy a new computer.

This morning, after meditating and while drinking coffee and scribbling inspired-from-somewhere ideas into and down onto my notebooks and steno pads – the cheap stuff akin to treasure maps these last 15 weeks – the clear thought came that the very next time my computer crashes (with blue fatal error messages) in the middle of something important to me right then and there – yes, right then and there I’m going on-line (once I can again) and order a new one. Free delivery.

That’s decided. Now, when I rented this room here in Encinitas for way more than I had – and hello new job with kids – part of the deal/rent included wifi. It turns out the wifi at this end of the house with amazingly cool and thick walls – wait, let me get all technical here – the wifi sucks when it even works (and it just this second turned off). Meaning if I remain here – and I am wide open to whatever ‘the plan’ is for me any day I wake up, meaning maybe I won’t – but if I do I’m going to have to purchase internet (modem/router/etc.) for my room. Rent my own internet. More money.

And more opportunity to twirl around in the abundance of it all.