Oh, Ya Gotta have Friends...

Yeah, I know. How gay is that for a title? Bette Midler's old rendition immediately comes to mind.

But I'm not going to talk about Gay Icons today. Someday I might tell you about seeing Bette doing "Clams on the Half-Shell" on B'way back in the early 80's. Maybe. If you're lucky.

No, today I'm going to talk about my friend, Bob. Bob works in IT someplace. It would be a disservice to Bob to say anything more about that, or about Bob at all, really, except to say that Bob is a true-blue friend. Bob's the kind of friend you'd come out of a blackout and find sitting beside you, both handcuffed to the bench in the police station. The kind of friend who'd look at you and say, "DAMN! THAT WAS FUN!!!!"

The kind of friend who'd happily drag himself out of bed at 3 in the morning to help you bury a body. No questions asked.

As I've whined about before, I've been living in a computerless wilderness at home for the past few weeks. My PC, such as it is, sits under the computer stand, lifeless and drab amongst the various piles of cables, many of them unused but God only knows they might come in handy some day so why bother picking them up now and finding God only knows what underneath of them!

But the noose is closing and action must be taken. The Feds (and New York and New Jersey) are fully expecting me to file my tax returns soon. And I can't do that as long as I have a dead PC in my living room. Something MUST be done. I found a solution (I think) on the internet. It involves ordering another drive (a 500Gigabyte beauty), buying something called "Partition Magic" and trying to find something with which I could boot the machine so I can "see" both an NTFS drive AND a FAT 32 drive. That's so I can copy my old files off my old, dying drive onto my zippy new one.

I scoured the internet for days (at work whenever I had a moment) and the common solution seemed to be in products I never heard of, such as DR-DOS 7.3 and other things like that.

And then it struck me! My friend Bob works in IT. I'll bet HE knows where I can get a boot disk. So I sent him an e-mail and quietly prayed.

And hour or so later I got his reply. He has exactly what I need and will happily lend me a copy of it to get me through my current woes.

I am SAVED, once again, by friendship. In this case, by my friendship with Bob.

There was a time in my life when I, if I'd been diagnosed with brain cancer, would've felt compelled to learn how to perform do-it-yourself surgery by next Thursday in order to have fixed the problem myself.

I thought, as one does when growing up in an alcoholic family, that everything had to be figured out for myself because I did not dare ask for help or, in any other way, "disturb" the undisturbable, suffering souls at home. I did not know that it was "okay" to ask for help. That that's what Earth-Children did. And Earth-Adults, too.

I found this out in recovery.

Every day I find myself becoming more and more like my life's dream. Every day I keep getting closer and closer to being...

human.