In a Bizarre Turn of Events...

I am now typing this on my brother’s computer, which is close to as slow as the Apple Lisa, with a keyboard that I can’t get used to and a mouse that has a population of dust (and the stuff that live with them, such as the Dust Mites and Dust Faeries) underneath.


This PC has been with us for… good god, quite about 7 years now, give or take. Back then it was the hotrod; the mean machine, built for gaming and for gaming only, the other PC perks tagging along as minuscule, overlooked and secondary applications. Now the gaming is gone from it, its hard drives overcrowded, its motherboard switched twice (now a run-of-the-mill cheap substitute) and its graphics card turned from a GeForce4 (the super-power accelerator back then) into a bargain price 3D Integrated Card.


And the fight is out of it, too. Lately I noticed its hard-disc spaces seem to disappear themselves, and the Ethernet card just decided to go kah-poot. It’s taking longer than usual to start and sometimes it wouldn’t start at all, and had to be reset a few times before the windows would run.

Old buddy, I think it’s time to go. I think it’s time to rest.


I’ve been taking time to look at catalogues for a new PC, which should come when my brother leaves for the UK with the laptop. This one will live on, in some ways; I’ll be transferring its hard-disc memory into the new one.


7 years have been a long run. A great run.


****

There’s something wrong with me head. I think it has to do with a mushroom.

Or a toadstool, perhaps. Possibly poisonous.

The mushroom is growing in my head and is taking up space, all the while tossing the left side of my brain into the pits of oblivion, and soon I believe my logic, reasoning and altogether my memories will be wiped-out cleaner than any slate.

It’s a daunting, almost horrible idea, but I think the mushroom has tampered with my means to feel the creeping tendrils of impending brain-death, and has left me in a prolonged state of contentment, littered with the occasional whim to go and dance in the rain.


If you think that I’m merely imagining all these, or perhaps had just jumped to an early, rather preposterous conclusion, then I wonder, good sir/madam, what do you make of the weird symptoms that I’ve been experiencing lately?


I’ve summed up my reasoning and, with the compiled data over the course of a week, came to the decision that a mushroom growth beneath the cranium is only too obvious. These are the symptoms that I have been experiencing;

1) Vivid dreams of a red mushroom, not unlike the ones you can find in Super Mario Brothers, looking at me with eyes as old as the rocks that formed the earth, eyes that carved into pity and slight resentment that said the words; “grow-up power-up!”


2) Lost of memory, like where I might’ve placed that damned camera battery or what are the classes on Tuesday.


3) Lack of reasoning and thinking abilities, like how I can’t figure why the battery would go missing or who might’ve taken it or whether it could’ve just got up and walked away from a life of abject monotony (wait, I haven’t figured that possibility out yet).


4) Unstable and inconsistent state of mind, which is sort of like being smart in one moment and in the next instant, completely stupid. This is determined from the Short Circuit Incident. It goes like this;


Instance of Brilliance.
I was nursing a headache at home and was watching National Treasure 2 when the electricity went off. Apparently the jumper went down, as it does sometimes when the lightning is too assiduous, and it would snap itself down whenever I try to flick it. Confused, I asked the neighbour and it’s apparent that I’m the only one with electricity down. It is undoubted, then, that the house is experiencing short-circuitry.


I noted that I’ve never been taught on how to handle a short-circuit situation and was about to think of calling for help like a helpless little girl when I figured that, why not? Perhaps it’s possible to trace the source of the circuit and isolate it, if you can consider that that the circuit is caused by a defunct application or object. It is only a simple matter of turning off every switch in the house and flicking up the jumper to see if the electricity comes back, then test each switch one by one.


And it worked. I’ve isolated and identified the source of the circuit to the large refrigerator in the wet kitchen (used to store large amount of meat and dog food). I’ve checked and concluded that the plug and its switch has not malfunctioned, therefore the fault must be the refrigerator itself. I’ve moved it out and was preparing to check the motors when I noticed the floor was wet. The wire providing the fridge with power goes all the way to that bottom part of the fridge. The water was causing the short-circuit. Good. It means that the fridge and its motors are functioning fine.


I dried the floor and even took time to clean it up the year’s worth of lizard/bug/rat droppings at the bottom of the fridge, and then I tried to the switch again. The jumper didn’t jump. Everything was fine. I felt pretty proud of myself.


Instance of Stupid.
Of course, there’s always a cause to something. Obviously the water couldn’t have gotten there unless the ceiling was leaking, but it didn’t rain and there were no signs of a leaking ceiling tile (you can tell if there’s a dark grey patch). The fridge has a hole at the corner to for water to flow should someone decided to clean it up, but the hole is at the other side and away from the wire, and the floor that side was dry. It didn’t make sense. Where did the water come from?


So I had to check.


I felt the side of the fridge and found it wet. It flowed a little from the side then. I searched the place where the dish-stand is. It was wet there. I searched under the stove and saw water there. Water had dripped onto the floor from where the dish-stand is. Then I realised; the whole place from the dish-stand to the stove was wet. And then I saw the packet of soup. I’ve bought soup noodles for the brother for lunch. I’ve propped the packet of soup at the dish-stand and never bothered to tie it securely after I was done transferring some fishballs. It had managed to fall sideways a little and a good 80% flowed out.


The soup had caused the short-circuit. Oh my god.


(Oh, and the camera battery I can’t find? My father had taken it out from the charger and had placed it at the top section of my book shelf so it was easy for me to see. I was too busy searching under my bed and concocting conspiracy theories to notice. That makes a DOUBLE STUPID.)


5) Lastly, some headaches that come out of nowhere and from no apparent cause. It would just happen. Mostly when I turn during my sleep, and it would blossom out into a full-fledge brain-numbing-dumbing migraine. How do I put it? It’s like having a chasm in a part of your head, and when you turn, you feel your mind falling into it, falling and falling into the emptiness, but then it’s still attached to the other part of the head and what it could do was just tumble and swing like a pendulum, and the world swings with it too.


There. I have a potentially fatal mushroom growth from within my head. My only way of curing this without having to spend millions at the next money-hungry neurosurgeon is to attempt self-trepanning. This can be achieved with the power-drill and the toilet mirror. A box full of Panadol soluble should work as anaesthetic. It all comes down to how much shock-trauma a patient can take before he kills himself.

God have mercy on my soul.