Porn Valley- I wish I could say I took the last couple of days off for vacation. And I probably could say that I spent the time in mourning for Jim Holliday. But the truth of the matter is that I contacted a deadly computer virus. And, like your first romance or first venereal disease, you never forget your first virus.
Mine struck approximately the moment it was learned that Jim Holliday died. Which was Thursday. Oh creepy, creepy, shudder, shudder. Veddy skerry, oooooooooooooh. Out of nowhere, my machine began staggering and moving much like Holliday which is to say a fat lady stripping out of a rubber dress. So, not knowing shit about computers, my first thought is to give Mike Barbella a call.
In addition to hawking tranny product for www.roberthillreleasing.com, Barbella is something of a technical wizard I’ve come to learn. In a gesture beyond generous, Barbella offered to come out and check the ol’ machine and, in the process, run some programs and do the ho-do, gurus do so well to get a hard drive back on its feet.
As the long afternoon wore on, it was becoming abundantly clear that my computer had visited more ports of call than a sailor with a fetish for painted women and grog. Progress towards recovery was agonizingly slow but one discovery arose from the occasion. You’d think I was hosting a West Hollywood crime scene, the way Barbella informed me that I had 365 DNA all over my machine.
“This shit’s a killer,” he keeps telling me, wondering in his own mind where “the culprits” came from. Oh I knew where they came from, alright. Every Friday morning when I visit The Sports Swami at cyberstationusa.com I get a good dose of 365- which I’ve now discovered is the cyber equivalent of fucking with open sores on your dick.
For this is a program that requires elaborate sign ins and downloading for the privilege of listening to The Swami proclaim Layla Jade as “British’s own” or, now with the sponsorship of www.hardcoregossip.com , that Devan over there is the master of the adult news and gossip universe. For other reasons that will become apparent, there’s also the discovery that factual challenge doesn’t stand a chance once The Swami gets on one of his adult industry opinion jags. But that’s just mere annoyance, the real kick in the nuts comes when 365 worms its way through your computer and fucks it in the ass.
Amid the plums of fatherly advice and dire warnings against spyware, Barbella’s frank to say that he could get my computer limping into the weekend except it really needed a good hosing. Plan B was the outside chance that if he took the hard drive right then and there he might have things up and running by the end of the evening. I was all for that and Barbella took the machine and had it back three hours later. Naturally I’m agonizing that I can’t get any Jim Holliday stories and anecdotes up.
Barbella returns with the machine and advised the downloading of another program overnight which he felt would go a long way towards solving the spyware problems. By the time I got started again Friday morning, the machine was adequate at best and I figured I could squeeze in some posting time- which I began to do- before the inevitable weekend visit to Barbella’s shop.
So I ask Barbella how he got to know so much about computers. “From ‘tweaking’ in the old days he told me which is basically drug parlance for staring at inanimate objects while in a coma. During those moments of lapsed consciousness, it became apparently reasonable for Barbella to dissect computers and figure what makes them tick. And he’s become pretty good at it now that the tweaking days are behind him. However, the stripper with a fish hook in her upper lip which Barbella tried to pick up at some Valley dive on Saturday night might be a testament that flashbacks are inevitable. Except that’s another story.
On the other hand, my tactical blunder was ignoring Barbella’s advice about 365. Out of habit more than anything else, I dialed into the Swami Friday morning, and, as the ominous red & white 365 logo flashed and attempted to wrest control of my computer, the machine began doing drugs Barbella might have coveted back in the day.
It flashed. It blinked. It groaned. It did the Jim Holliday death rattle. I saw the fat lady in the rubber dress doing the Lambada.
Consequently, my computer went to the shop for the overhaul and experienced more adventure this weekend than a rosy faced English lad in an 18th century novel. Except that’s another story.