Blackout.

Feb. 8, Harlingen, TX.
My computer just froze: it went all black.
I was nursing Dylan today for about the twelfth time in two hours and trying to work on it at the same time (can be done if he's nursing at the left nipple, and I'm even getting better at using my left hand) when Gramo, one of my cats, jumped onto the keyboard. By the time I put down Dylan to get the cat off, the screen went black, except for a pale yellowish circle of light at the center, taunting me with the wonderful but now utterly unattainable digital world, like a mischievous ghost of the machine.
What do you do when your computer has a problem and there is no way you can send it to Apple because there is no way you can get it back without a permanent address it can be delivered at in a decent amount of time?
One of the pitfalls of living on the road: no decent mail delivery.
Here's how it works. The mail goes to the post office box of the Circus Chimera in small town called Hugo, Oklahoma (20 miles from Paris, Texas, of Wim Wenders' fame), where Alan, in the circus office, waits to get a bundle together before sending it FedEx to the lot where the circus is at on the road, or to the nearest Kinko's hold out location. The result is you can wait for up to a couple of months before seeing your mail. Forget The New Yorker at your door.
So as I was staring at my blank laptop, I kept praying that it would gracefully come to life again of its own. Amazingly all it took was getting out the User's Guide and actually reading it, sheepishly peering through the Troubleshooting chapter until, lo and behold, here was the exact trouble I was having, something I would have sworn never ever worked, but voila!, it did.
The other dreaded digital-world-on-the-road event: You Are not Connected to the Internet.
Computer failures always leave you a little scared, waiting anxiously and entirely helplessly for the next meltdown episode. Wireless internet connection failure, on the other hand, are pure frustration, since there is absolutely nothing you can do about it other than wait and click over and over again on the refresh button knowing full well that won't do anything either.
Today was just one of those days. And then some, with Dylan wanting to nurse every hour and nor sleeping for more than a half hour at a time, if at all.
Last night Donald Chimal was over for dinner and later on, after the show, to help Fridman learn the parking coordination. He's also working as a clown in the show, which still doesn't have one, nor an artistic director either, both being Guennadi's roles before he was thrown out.