The new computer took so long to arrive, I was worried that there was going to be a new model out by the time it got here.
It was sent by one of those tortuous courier routes with the tracking website that lists every forlorn way station en route: Shanghai. (Shanghai!), Anchorage, then Louisville, Ky., of all places, where it sat for days while I refreshed my browser over and over.
The arrival of a new computer is a fraught time. Don't believe anyone who tells you it isn't. The change from one machine to the next is a demarcation point in life. This is the thing I've laid hands on for half my waking hours every day for the past five years, my constant companion. I suffered a twinge of guilt as I used my old computer to buy a new one. It felt callous.
You only have so many computers in life, just as you only live in so many apartments, and love so many people. It would be a loss not to bond with them as they pass, except the really wretched ones.
Yet the whole ritual may be time-limited. After all, these are the twilight days of the personal computer. The idea that one big, expensive, beloved object should be our gateway to the digital world is receding.
There's more than soft-headedness at play here. A computer is far more than an object; it's a profoundly strange device, one that bridges two worlds. It's an extension of the brain that lives in a discrete shell. It's the rest of the human race, in a little box. It's the object in our house where the mind keeps its stuff.
Not everybody bonds with their machines. Some people keep their dreary work computers at arm's length, and reserve their home time for more humane pursuits. This is a fine way to do things.
But others live by their machines. For those whose living is reading and writing, for the information-age workers that policy-makers want to turn us all into, what is there but the glowing little box? The plastic-metal clamshell that sits by the bedside at night and slips into a bag on the way to work in the morning.
Some people mark their machines with stickers and doodads. Even those who don't become keenly aware of every nick, scratch and dent, like the moles on their skin. You can't help but notice when you're so close all the time. (My mother recently appeared in town with her small white laptop, a thin line etched into its lid. It lived in the kitchen until a month ago, when her husband mistook it for a cutting board.)
Yet the personal computer never gets its due as a companion - unlike, say, the car. Computers are sold as commodity items, or, in the case of Apple, lifestyle items that promise membership in a certain class. But cars are sold as expressions of individuality. The Western canon would be a lot more concise if it didn't have to deal with men bonding with, then parting from, their automobiles. (The country-and-western canon all the more so.)
Cars and computers have a good deal in common: Both are objects with which their operators become so familiar, the line between person and machine all but vanishes. The proverbial "being at one with the road" really means being one with the car. It's no different with a computer: You can forget your own hands on the keyboard as you fall into the digital realm. And familiarity breeds intimacy.
Cars, alas, aren't going anywhere. But the primacy of the personal computer is ending. The era of intimate association between the data we collect and the physical case it's kept in is fading.
On one hand, the rise of "cloud" services is pushing data storage off hard drives and into vast online data centres. There's increasingly no need to have your computer with you to access the digital environment you call home. For all too many, the desktop that really matters now is Facebook, anyway.
On the other, computer hardware is drifting away from its traditional forms. The tablet and the smart phone, small computers both, are on the rise. And even traditional laptops are evolving into more interchangeable, disposable, network-oriented packages.
There was a time when your computer was your computer, inside and out, and your creative life revolved around that object. Maybe that time is still now, but it probably won't be forever.
I got my new computer. It's everything I wanted, and I'll be broke for the foreseeable future. The machine I hauled around every day for five years is sitting across the room. It's plugged in, battery charged, soft light pulsing. I still haven't turned it off.