Good Riddance: A Goodbye to My Favorite Writing Companion

Retiring my laptop, intuitive technology, and the search for a new name.

Saying goodbye to my beloved computer. (Screensaver quote by Jack Hirschman.)

Happy Saturday, and welcome back to Good Riddance, our weekly series where we gather in the comments below to let something go, however big or small—an interaction that left us raw, a physical object you hold some attachment to but no longer need, or, you know, democracy as we knew it, however flawed it may have been. *Deep sigh*

In the Spring of 2019 I found myself needing to buy a new laptop as I said goodbye to my previous one, a very sturdy, shiny, light silver MacBook Air I named Feather. (I’ve named all my laptops, a continued tradition of naming most of my journals and diaries as a kid.) Feather had seen me through the writing of Any Man and Era of Ignition, the #MeToo era, the creation of the Time’s Up organization, and the birth of my daughter, Marlow. Feather and I had been through a lot together, and I was very sad to part ways, but it was time: she wasn’t working the way she used to, I had used up most of her memory and storage space, and a concerning variety of liquids had been spilled on her keys over the years (coffee, bourbon, and breast milk, to name a few).

Feather went into retirement in my office closet on the shelf next to the laptops that came before her (Ronda, Lightning, Ronda 2) and was replaced by a much heavier MacBook Pro that came in a darker shade of gray which I aptly named, The Brick. Feather saw me through many creatively fulfilling and politically charged years of my life, but The Brick became a much different kind of writing companion, carrying me through some of the biggest upheavals and changes I can remember.

The undersides of my last several computer babies. From top to bottom: Ronda, Feather, and The Brick (featuring a name tag that Derrick C. Brown made for me while we on a poetry tour together).

The Brick was there with me at the beginning of a worldwide pandemic that started in 2020; the death of my mentor Jack Hirschman; the death of my godfather, the actor Dean Stockwell; as well as the death of Y: The Last Man and Time’s Up (so many deaths). And it was also where I wrote and edited the anthology, Listening in the Dark: Women Reclaiming the Power of Intuition, and launched this newsletter into the world. The Brick is where I learned how to use Zoom on a regular basis to conduct meetings that couldn’t be done in person, and where I socialized with friends during the stay-at-home order. It is where I wrote the poem, “This Living,” in the midst of feeling all the loss, sadness, and grief of that time.

The Brick has been an amazing laptop over the last six years, but it had a key feature that gave way to a whole bunch of other problems—the dreaded Touch Bar. This Touch Bar replaced the very top row of keys on a traditional keyboard and was supposed to be a more intuitive, user-friendly way to improve workflow—from switching between different tabs in your browser, opening documents or apps quickly, or even just inserting emojis with ease.

But the Touch Bar was anything but intuitive (a word I know well at this point) and never really functioned the way it was supposed to. Over time, it created all kinds of other problems for the computer as a whole. When I took The Brick in to see a technician at the Apple Store after it began to crash on me late last year, he told me this was an issue with many of the Touch Bar models of that year, and it was only a matter of time before I was going to need to replace the laptop.

So, this week I let go of (and said a very bittersweet goodbye to) The Brick as I sent her off into retirement next to Feather and the others. Good riddance to that irritating Touch Bar and all the trouble it caused over the years. I will not miss my finger accidentally grazing it and causing fifteen different applications to open at the same time while I’m in the middle of writing.

The Brick (left) migrating over all her good data to my brand new computer (right), named ????

This week I got a new 15” MacBook Air in the color “starlight.” In honor of her very first writing task—this post!—I’d like to ask all of you here in our LITD community to help me with the very special job of giving her a name. Please put any suggestions in the comments, along with your let go for the week!

For your calendar:

• AWP Awards Reception, March 26, 6:30pm PT (Los Angeles, CA): If you’re planning on attending the AWP conference this month in Los Angeles, I’ll be hosting their Awards Reception & Benefit for LA Fire Recovery on Wednesday, March 26. Come say hello if you’re there! Tickets are $15 by suggested donation. Click here for more info.
  

• April’s The Short and Sweet, TBD: April is National Poetry Month, so the theme of this TSAS will be, you guessed it, poetry! More details soon.