Defragging is divine

Do you defrag? Really? Do you watch while you defrag? Like a teenage voyeur behind the picket fence gasping as Sally steps into her bath?

I have it on good geek authority that it’s OK to watch those blue and yellow and green pixels shuttle and skip across the screen as your hard drive periodically re-arranges its brain.

Right now, as I type (while I defrag), I have 43 fragmented files in 268 fragments, a total of 10.9 gigs, being deftly shunted out of anarchy into an orderly neural network. How, I wonder, can a single bitmap image get so scrambled in my PC’s brain that it’s been scattered in 32 fragments across the hard drive. And yet, somehow, when summonsed to appear, manages to miraculously reconstitute itself.

I have on occasion watched my hard drive defrag for some hours at a time. It’s comforting, womb-like, a return to the natural order of things, and it can’t be rushed. I have marvelled as a zillion digital refugees are repatriated in orderly fashion; every little fragment has to find its proper home, in its proper partition. Every bit and byte belongs in just the right place.

Defragging can help you discover God. The process is so sublime, so predestined that’s its hard not to believe that God is camped out on the motherboard orchestrating the whole process with exquisite precision. Darwinian defragging would be such a messy, clumsy affair, with bits and bytes bitching and scratching over the same gaps in the hard drive, never getting it right. In my good book, defragging is divine.

What’s truly impressive about defragging is that the cleanup frees up brain space (I have recovered several gigs worth since I started writing this) without throwing anything important away. Orderliness is godliness …

My short-term memory is a mess and I think I know why — it’s appallingly fragmented. I can only begin to imagine how many broken snippets it’s made up of and in how many chaotic locations these bits are being stored, out of synch, out of order and almost impossible to retrieve and reassemble into a meaningful chunk of memory. Is this what Alzheimer’s is really all about? A fragged brain?

You just have to wonder how come no-one has come up with a defrag solution for the human mind. I would love to free up some space in mine; the burden of 50 plus years of accumulated thoughtless nonsense and other mental garbage is pretty damn heavy. My mind feels overwhelmed by a zillion disconnected fragments of stupidity, remorse, guilt, ignorance and apathy that sometimes roll-up into nightmares that scare the shit out of the dreamer.

At least I don’t feel alone. I think there are a lot of people out there whose brains are so completely fucking fragged that they don’t even know who they are, where they are. Trevor Manuel comes to (my broken) mind …