In having a hard drive crash, I've been reloading the main system... all... day. Its something I have never really enjoyed - the time spent waiting for something to be ready, and the long periods of time it takes to download updates and code through the cocktail straw of a pipe I have in Trinidad. It is like watching refrigerated molasses ooze.

And yet, it is clean. It is the wiping of a system that had grown cluttered in ways that I had not appreciated in some time. A system that, in 2005, was new is once again new in 2008 - through the failure of a hard drive. And I find myself not wanting to install too much on it. It is light. It is fast. It is clean. It doesn't have the gigabytes of documents I had on it - thankfully, I had already backed those up. It doesn't have the years and years of emails stored away, it doesn't have all that junk I was slowly sifting through - some of the junk older than the computer itself.

Clean.

While it is a severe pain and has set me back more than 12 hours so far, what with Microsoft's bloated updates, the machine is clean.

Clean.

It is probably good that the hard drive failed, and that the system is now so clean. It weighed on me; it was like watching a close friend put on weight gradually over the years. Some people treat their systems as tools, and rightfully so - but for me, systems have always been an extension of me. An expression of me. An aspect of me. And until the hard drive crashed, it seemed like the system was too weighed down with old information to really look for the new stuff.

Clean.

Would that it would be so simple to clear a mind, to erase from it all the baggage it carries around and slings at anyone close enough to be hit.

Clean.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could just do this with traffic congested roads? With centuries of evolution built on cornerstones of that which is less than good now.

Clean.