a scrounger's plea

Patrons of LI!

I was so hoping to avoid my usual scrounger’s week this year – the week in which I beg for contributions to maintain LI as a viable blog. But, after floating through this year in a shimmer of good luck, Nemesis, the Devil and little baby Jesus all spotted me crawling about on the earth whistling a happy tune, and intervened to throw a little shit into my life, financially speaking. Last Thursday, my decade old computer gave up the ghost. I went to have it repaired at a computer shop stocked with used computers, and under the suave ministrations of the pirate at the counter, was pursuaded to purchase a better computer from that golden year, 2004. Mistake! It turns out I was dealing with the computer shop of horrors, a veritable den of lemons. Things have changed in ten years. Computer shops used to be run by computer geeks – a band of mostly young men obsessed with the ins and outs of the machine. A band who had switched off their Oedipal affection for the mother and switched on their Oedipal affection for the motherboard. No longer, alas. Computers have sunk to the level of automobiles, and computer shops are now run by the kind of people who used to wear the gray grease stained work suits and the gimme caps, the people who used to say, looks like the transmission. That’s gonna cost ya!

The upshot of which is that I had many adventures with the lemon that I, in all innocence, purchased, all of them of the bad medecine kind – and finally, late Saturday afternoon, I extracted a workable computer from the shop of horrors and hightailed for home with it.

Thus, my plea: Please contribute to LI – via the handy Pay Pal button – if you have ten plus buckos and are feeling in the generous mood. I’ll beg and plead some more this week, and hopefully round up enough to pay for LI's computer. And you, lucky reader, will benefit too, from the infinite verbiage that will pour off the keyboards. Thanks!