#98: "Ten Years Before The Mast"

I tried to write this last week but I got a bit derailed. It continues the nautical theme I'd mentioned then, only now it's disjointed and the theme doesn't work anymore. Oh well, that's life.

I thought about the title of today's letter before I knew much about it. I remembered it from Pirates of the Caribbean. You remember the part in the second movie where he shakes down the crew of the wrecked ship that Will Turner is on? That was for 100 years before the mast. The term "before the mast" refers to where ship's crew quarters were; generally just below the main deck and in the fore of the ship. It was a term of service.

There's also a book about this called Two Years Before the Mast by R.H. Dana Jr. I'd never heard of it, and I haven't read it so I can't recommend it. If anyone out there has, I'd like to know more about it and I'll try and share with the group.

No, I was just thinking about a decade. It's a long damned time, and you don't really realize it is/was until you really sit down and focus. Ten years ago right now I would have been sitting in a cheap apartment in Tallahassee, probably doing exactly what I'm doing now - writing. For me grad school was in full swing, and though I have no way to know exactly what project I was working on, I have a good idea. The spring of that first year I was given a big design project with a short deadline, so I was working on it both at school and at home. My gear at home just wasn't cutting it.

At the time I had a PowerMac G5. I remember when I bought it; it was the second most expensive thing I'd ever purchased. I'm pretty sure I bought it in 2004, so by 2009 it was starting to show its age. I replaced it with an iMac that cost me $1500. 

That iMac was with me in Florida; for all those hours of writing papers and doing design projects for a theatre I believed in but a program I didn't. It came with me to DC where it happily recorded the explosion of songwriting that happened during that year. It went with me to Maine where it was little more than my HDTV and played Netflix all the time. It came with me to New York, and kept happily chugging along from Queens to Brooklyn and from apartment to apartment to the basement of a brownstone.

Eventually I couldn't update the OS anymore. Software stopped working or became so slow it wasn't worth using. I could still write on it, but anything that taxed the processor had to be done with all other apps closed lest the entire thing bog down and crawl like molasses in winter. Through it all, though, it was the computer that wouldn't quit.

I finally replaced that machine a few weeks ago. I found a lightly used iMac for a great price and couldn't let it pass. I kept using that old machine for a bit while I contemplated how to migrate a decades worth of stuff. Thousands and thousands of written documents, some as old as the mid 90's. As of this evening, exactly 2200 albums of music. A few games, but nothing that's been relevant for the last 15 years (Halo forever). $150 per year for a computer that served me well. Can't complain about that, but I suppose it's time for its retirement.

The hard part is that the machine still works, I just don't know what to do with it. It feels a bit like what we do with humans as we age. It's sad that everything we have has become so disposable, from children's toys to mobile phones to people. I don't know how we fix any of that, but I'm going to try and find something useful to do with that iMac so maybe it can give another ten years to someone.