The other day I dropped my PowerBook while making the bed and though it survived -- a tough little laptop, I once got my leg caught in the power cord and send it flying across the room -- I no longer had my WiFi connection. Since it landed, closed, on the front end I figured the card dislodged but, um, where the hell was the card? So I went without over the weekend and did some drawings (an impossible Vagabond Apparatus installation called "Okinawa", mostly) and delved into John Le Carre's "A Perfect Spy" from which I marked this passage:

"See, Magnus, without informations we are nothing. But with informations we can go anywhere in the world, we are like turtles, our houses always on our backs. You learn to paint, you can paint anywhere. A sculptor, a musician, a painter, they need no permits. Only their heads. Our world must be inside our heads. That is the only safe way. Now you play Lippsie a nice tune."

Magnus is the spy of title as a little boy and Lippsie is his father's mistress, a German Jew who felt guilty because she survived the Holocaust and the rest of her family and friends didn't. Then she dies somehow -- Le Carre can take pages to describe a minor detail of tradecraft then kills off a major character in one sentence.

But back to my WiFi. I worked seven days in a row so it wasn't until today, Tuesday, I could take the laptop to Tekserve to see about getting it fixed. The last time I'd been there my monitor had died and they were in a ratty second floor warren with an old Mac used as a fishtank. Now it's a ground floor glitzy warren and there is a real fish tank. While I waited I watched a video of someone taking a laptop apart then reassembling it. The nice young woman who quickly undid the battery cover and pushed the WiFi card back into place neither gloated like I'm sure an Apple Genius would have (which is why I didn't go to the Apple Store) nor did she charge me. Perhaps she felt it was her good deed for the elderly.

To soothe my bruised ego I had lunch at the Malibu Diner down the street then went home to check my email for the first time since Thursday. When you're disconnected it's natural to assume there is something enormously important that must be answered immediately waiting for you but, no, other than I seem to have won the Irish Sweepstakes and someone asking about the Jesse Helms mask that was on an old site but disappeared when the server moved a few years ago. I may have it stashed away on some now undreadable disc somewhere but like most of my evidence it's probably lost. Perhaps if I really did win the Irish Sweepstakes I could recover these scraps of my life. Money can do that, can't it?

When I returned I found a TV and futon/sofa in the common area but still no roommates. There's hope, now, the refrigerator and stove will be fixed. Hot water for my morning shower may be expecting too much. But I did get my Armani jacket back from the dry cleaners so that, too, is a good sign.