Rebooting the Twerp

One of the defining events of the past few months has been my attempted reanimation of the Twerp. As you may recall, near the end of last year this rational, logical—not to mention irritating—entity had been bound and gagged and made to sleep under the bed with the dust mites, but recent circumstances seemed to call for the kind of reason, logic, and general git 'er done attitude that earned the Twerp his unsavory reputation in the first place. But when cannonballs are whizzing past your head, what you want is a highly organized, single-minded field commander with one purpose in life, and that's to win the battle at hand. That way, you're more likely to win the next one, because fighting becomes considerably more difficult after a cannonball lops off your head.

So the Twerp was rebooted, and when he came online he immediately set about the task of gittin 'er done, which is how the Administrator ended up under the bed, bound and gagged, with the dust mites. You can't have two commanders on the battlefield, and the Twerp isn't big on compassion, because . . . well, because compassion can be sort of counterproductive in the git 'er done scheme of things. It isn't like the Twerp pulls the wings off butterflies, but he can't very well stop the battle to administer first aid to a butterfly who forgot to keep its head down, if you see what I mean.

Anyway, there were repercussions. The deposed Administrator was quickly forgotten, and although it was clear to everyone that something was missing, the exact nature of that something couldn't be so easily identified. It was as if everything that truly mattered had disappeared, and the more time went on, the more questionable it became that there had ever really been things that truly mattered. Where life had been mysterious it became mind-numbingly predictable, which is a clear indication that existence has been compressed to fit within the confines of a predefined system of some sort. Although such systems often work splendidly—highly organized and generally efficient processes tend to work well—they're systems nonetheless, and therefore intrinsically limited.

As Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor might say—or not, since I just decided she might—that calculating, linear, methodical left hemisphere is useful for a lot of things, but then, that's true of computers in general.