meish dot org: life, unfolding

There was this night at the end of my fourth year of undergraduate study at Liverpool – and I have to admit that, as it was just after the end of exams, we might have been a little bit…um…under the influence, and that’s ok because, you know, we were young and carefree and that’s what we did back then, because we didn’t care about jobs and life and social responsibility, we just cared about having fun, however remote and distant that feeling may be now.

Anyway, after a momentarily diverting interlude which involved placing an electric toothbrush on the end of one’s nose (“it makes your whole head buzz”), Charlotte, my then flatmate announced that what would be really really magnificently weird would be watching the cascade of playing cards that happens at the end of a game of computer solitaire.

Yeah. That would be kind of bizarre looking.

So with all the logic and enthusiasm that an altered state can summon, we switched on my computer and waited approximately four years for it to boot up. It was a very old machine – very very old – running Windows 3.1 and only useful for bashing out the odd essay, playing interminable games of minesweeper and teaching myself to use DOS. It gradually groaned into life, and we both pulled up chairs to the desk and got ready to play.

One thing we hadn’t really figured out was that in order to see the brilliant display of cascading cards, we’d have to play solitaire first – and win. Hard enough when in sober mind, this was not something we were capable of attempting half-cut, although by gum we certainly tried.

And then something odd happened. Charlotte said something frictive, and a little globule of moisture flew from her lips to the screen. It made a trippy pattern on the screen, refracting the light. We both looked at it. She did it again, this time on purpose – “pah!” – and the white screen came alive with rainbow polkadots which changed colour as you moved your head.

Stop for a moment. Let’s do a little experiment, shall we? Lick your index finger. Now dab it on the sceen over there in the white space next to this paragraph. See how it’s made up of lots of different colours, refracted light? Now move your head a bit from side to side and up and down. See how cool that looks (in a really really limited way)? Now imagine you’re off your head. OK, now imagine how thoroughly absorbing this activity was, at quarter to four in the morning, completely munged.

Now, bearing in mind that we were quite wankered – and you may well have been in a similar state yourself, at some point – you’ll forgive and perhaps even understand that we spent a further seven minutes that evening taking it in turns to shout “PAH!” at the monitor and gazing at the results with mirth. You might even forgive the fact that we got a pint glass of water and sat flicking water at the screen, enraptured at the pretty patterns the droplets left behind. But not even the most hardy of partyers could forgive us going to the effort of emptying into a spare teapot and then filling up with water the plant spray thingy from the living room and waving it gleefully in the direction of my poor computer monitor.

See, the thing is (and here’s a lesson in basic electrical engineering for you) – electrical stuff doesn’t get on very well with wet stuff. So with a damp fizzle and a surprised pop, the monitor died on us – no bloody wonder, frankly, and it’s a miracle we weren’t electrocuted in the process, because that would have been a tough one to explain at the autopsy.

My poor monitor died because we were bored (and a bit out of it). My poor, poor monitor.

We shrugged, switched off the machine at the wall and turned to something else for excitement – I don’t remember what; it was about half four in the morning, so it might very well have been sitting on the fire escape outside the house (where you could hang out and just about pretend that you were in a Noo Yawk apartment building, ya know?) counting cars, or something equally scintillating.

The moral of this story is that it wouldn’t have happened if we’d had something to amuse us in our unfortunate half-baked state – like this site, for example, which would have kept us and thousands of other bollocksed students captivated us for simply hours, I swear (and which reminds me in execution of Plumb Design’s eternally brilliant visual thesaurus) – and this is the reason that the Interwebnet is fundamentally a Good Thing, and I curse my studentlike cheapness for not shelling out for a modem until it was too late. Bah.