Living on Desperados

After four days without internet, Deutsche Telekom finally came through—DSL 6000 with a flat phone rate. I know. But when you’ve been reduced to actual human contact for days on end, even a Telekom contract starts looking like salvation.

And despite fully intending to spend the entire weekend catching up on my browser history, that’s not what happened. There was a bike tour with Ana and her mother—surprisingly enjoyable, inexplicably sweaty. A despondent but somehow cozy bonfire at André’s place (pronounce it with the French accent; it’s funnier). And then the Melodrom, where we went to properly lose ourselves. The music was genuinely better than most clubs: lots of Muse, Beatsteaks, Queens of the Stone Age—exactly my thing. One of the opening acts, The Giotto, had this endearingly dazed quality about them; their singer kept reminding me of Amanda Bynes, which I mean as something close to a compliment.

Somewhere in there I finally decluttered my Mac. I have this habit—had, I’m saying had now—of dumping everything I download into a weirdly named folder and scattering it somewhere on the hard drive, never to be found again without Spotlight. So: useless apps, gone. All the porn, gone. Ancient setup files from software I used twice in 2004, gone. Photos sorted properly into iPhoto. Dashboard overhauled—old widgets out, new ones in. It feels like a different machine.

The problem is I spent the entire weekend living on Desperados, spinach potato wedges, and green spelt burgers drowning in ketchup. And now I’m paying for it. Genuinely sick—last night I nearly suffocated from a blocked nose, which is a sentence I didn’t expect to write at my age. Today is television and internet only, no exceptions. The body has spoken and I have nothing to argue back with.