I recently learned two important things. The first is that it is not a good sign when your computer hard drive starts making clicking sounds. The second is that, if it does start to click, you should probably start copying things immediately onto CD. I opted to restart the system and see if the problem went away. The only thing that went away, though, was my hard drive and more than a decade of files.

E-mails. Photos. Journal entries. Essays. All gone. My novel is the only thing I was diligent enough to backup on a regular basis. Everything else almost entirely existed on the hard drive.

When I was told the data cold not be recovered cheaply, my heart sank and I began thinking how much I would have to pay to get everything back. Within ten minutes, though, another thought pushed through the loss and resonated even more deeply.

I’m free.

I called my friend Chris to tell him about my computer woes, less about the hard drive crash than about Apple Computer’s insistence that I didn’t own the broken hard drive and they would get to keep it after I paid for an entire new one. When I mentioned the lost e-mail, he brought up in a moment’s notice my first e-mail to him from 1993.

As he read aloud my first e-mail to him, it wasn’t shocking what it contained. It said I was writing a novel and losing weight.

In fact, most of my journal entries that were lost will contain similar information. Like clockwork, I always wrote an annual e-mail essay and send it to friends around the end of June, typically after gay pride. It was about feeling that I was missing something, that I was watching a party I crash every year but don’t feel a part of, or welcome at. I wasn’t one of the fabulous skinny boys with a huge group of friends in pride-chic clothes, or shirtless, celebrating our lives. Pride always made me wonder when my life was going to start.

The novel thing is a bit vaguer as I was always on some sort of diet, but I was rarely working seriously on a novel. When I wrote a Viewpoint piece for The Advocate in 1994, they wrote back and said they needed a short bio to tag at the end. So, I sent back “Jeff Walsh is a reporter in Kingston, Pa., and is working on his first novel.” Of course, I hadn’t written a single word on a novel at that point. I was a horrible reader. But it sure sounded nice. At that point, the most I had written was half a screenplay called “Getting By,” which contained a gay character named Paul whom I used cathartically to accept my own sexuality a year earlier.

A few months back, I went through more files I had saved over the years and deleted hundreds of them. It was always my intent to do a big backup of all my files. I just wanted to go through everything and get rid of the junk first. Every essay I opened read the same. Writing. Weight.

If anything, reading the e-mails made me feel bad about my friends who have constantly had to hear about my two-pronged life that just goes around and around, yielding minimal results.

Sometimes I wonder how much of my current novel not being completed can be attributed to fear. I don’t know how to not be an unsuccessful wannabe without results. And change is always spooky.

I haven’t posted this on the public blog before, but I don’t plan to be at my current job within the next 12 months. Instead, I plan to focus more on the writing and get my money instead from waiting tables or being a bartender. There are a multitude of reasons for that, but one thing I know is that being overweight will not help me in those fields. So, there is a direct, tangible reason for which I really need to get serious about this.

After fighting with Apple, I now own my busted hard drive. It is in a box near my computer desk. I can pay hundreds of dollars and get back everything, or I can just let it sit here for a while and decide at some point - like a box of stuff you don’t ever open a year after moving - that I don’t need it anymore.

So, as geeky as it is, I see the hard drive crash as wiping my own slate clean. A new beginning. A way to abandon reminders of my past and create a new future.

This time next year, I hope to throw that broken hard drive in the trash.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 9th, 2004 at 11:04 am and is filed under diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.