Beware of crude imitations

I got the call yesterday. A nice but generally unstable fellow, who had undergone a cataclysmic financial and emotional fall from grace in recent years, left three or four messages for me. I really didn't have time to deal, sloughed them off, but felt a tinge of guilt and loyal responsibility and finally called him back. He had been good to me on more than one occasion and I try to repay in kind.

He told me that a friend had what might be a Picasso painting and would I check out a picture of it. I never received the email until this morning. Opening the thing up on my phone I had a funny, funky feeling which I chalked up to indigestion from last night's over rich Italian dinner and house vodka.

This painting was as far away from Picasso's hand as I am from Hemingway. Crude and strange signature, wrong style, frankly a total joke. Not even a failed attempt by Irving Pcasso, the painter's ne'er do well younger brother. My friend had included a picture of a piece of furniture that he wanted to sell as well. I decided to fire up the laptop and fulfill my total professional obligation by taking a better look.

I couldn't sleep any longer in the crummy hotel room anyway, this week my home away from home being Crowne Plaza Hotel San Francisco Airport, which was conveniently perched right over the northern lane of Highway101 with all of the attendant noise and bustle. Not to mention the filthy carpet and practically no water pressure in shower whatsoever. A proverbial shithole.

I opened the email attachment on my Macbook Pro and the computer instantly crashed. Tried to relaunch, went into the land of the spinning disk for a few seconds and died. I tried to restart and nothing. Black screen, not even a blue screen. I waited for the tone and held the shift key down, trying to start in safe mode. Nothing. Pulled the new battery and reinserted. Zilch. This may be the end.

I realize that I have a solipsistic and somewhat overactive imagination, sometimes easily assuming causal relationships that may not actually exist. Coincidences and strange stack ups have to occur occasionally  in our infinite and random universe, what would be truly strange is if they did not. But I can't help thinking that the bad Picasso triggered some awful synchronistic chain reaction that has now fried my beloved Macbook Pro with the red Speck case and the cool grateful dead sticker as well as my own keister. Somebody's bad forgery starts a chain of negative energy that ends up mutating like a bad virus, manifests on the physical plane and now exacts its revenge on poor old Bobby Sommers and his beloved hard drive. Fuck. Can't afford this shit right now. Once again no good deed goes forward without exacting proper revenge.

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I actually have some things to recount about the week. Unfortunately they will now have to wait a bit. I am using the funky computer in the hotel business office and I don't think I can deal much longer with the spongey foreign keyboard on the communal pc. Peace.