Bill Gates Doesn't Give a Shit About Me

I've had it up to my eyeballs with the Windows operating system. I just lost today's entry because my computer, just as it does practically every time I turn it on, locked up and had to be restarted, losing everything I'd worked on. I'm livid.

And you know what makes me most angry? I really can't be that angry, because I know that - in the grand scheme - my piddling computer problems don't amount to a whole lot. Some people didn't have anything to eat today. So I can't even get mad about this.

But I can have my say, and it's this: How the fuck did Bill Gates get to be the richest man on earth by producing products that, under the best of circumstances, rarely do what they're supposed to do? My laptop is a year old, and I have never had so much trouble with a computer in all of my life. Windows ME, my friends, sucks snot. Mr. Gates and company are really, really lucky that I have no money, because if I did, I would throw this piece of shit out into the street just for the pleasure of watching it shatter into a million pieces, and I would march right to the nearest store and buy myself a fully-loaded Apple.

But you know what? First of all, Bill Gates doesn't give a shit about me, and secondly, people are starving in Africa (and other places, like New York City, for that matter). So I'm just going to quietly fume and try not to punch the next Apple owner who smirks at me.

Before a computer crash robbed me of today's portion of tranquility, I'd been writing about how odd it was that I enjoyed gloomy weather. This line of reasoning had been brought on by the big-ass thunderstorms that had been rolling across NYC this evening.

But in the middle of re-booting, and thinking through what I'd been writing, it occurred to me that I wasn't really looking at the whole picture. See, I'd been thinking that I was unusual in liking gloomy weather, but it just occurred to me that it's not really gloomy weather I enjoy so much - it's a nice summer thunderstorm, and there's a world of difference, I think, for most people; not just me.

I hadn't really thought about it, but I get just as gloomy - maybe more so - as most people when the sun goes away for long periods of time. But for some reason, I was thinking of my reaction to a thunderstorm as being all rolled up into my reaction to gloomy weather in general. But it's just not so...

I love a thunderstorm. It has a lot to do, as I was saying yesterday, with feeling alive, and feeling like a paradoxically inconsequential but necessary part of a much larger scheme or ecosystem or whatever. The smell in the air, and the violence implicit in it, and the way the air changes from being abominably close and muggy to suddenly light and crisp - the change in temperature that comes with a good, crashing summer storm.

Maybe the joy of it comes from the primal, even cellular recognition that water equals life; that without that rain, there could be no life on earth... without a good thunderstorm, all the accomplishments of the human race would be worthless, or more precisely, non-existent.

That's quite a picture above, isn't it? I found it on The Weather Channel's website. It was submitted by a viewer, Greg Blount, for their gallery of weather shots. I love photographs of lightning, and I hope someday to be able to afford a good enough camera that I can do that sort of nature photography.

Maybe the measure of a successful life is not how much money you've got in the bank as much as it's how much you get to do the things you want... From that standpoint, I don't know if I'd call myself a success, but I think I'm doing okay.