to not hear about Steve Jobs’ death immediately.

My family have been Mac people for as long as we’ve had computers, although my brother, who needs more flexibility and Computing Power, has used LINUX machines for a long time. But Macs were the first computers I grew up with, and my attachment to them exceeds even my attachment to the Jeep and the Thunderbird.

The Mac computer is the rehearsal room for everything I have ever written, apart from one brief PC laptop experience in college. I don’t really know if it’s the design, or the user-friendliness, or the fact that I know I could be editing video and sound if I wanted to (although I rarely do these days.) But by now, the Mac is a part of me, and a part of how I write.

One black MacBook in particular got me through almost a half-decade of post-college theater days. I had it on my lap or in my backpack for every rehearsal I went to, every notes session I attended.

When its hard drive died after four years of very rugged use, and travels from Denver to Indianapolis to San Francisco to New York, the company gave it a new brain. It went into the Sick Bay of the Apple store in Chicago and came out looking the same, but with a whole new identity. They didn’t charge me.

I lost files, but I continued to have my sense of consumer attachment to the Mac folks. Somehow, the files didn’t matter as much as that the machine was still with me. I wrote my entire grad school thesis on it. I still have that computer, although I’m writing this on a faster, newer MacBook Pro.

I’m very grateful to these computers, and to Jobs for making these computers possible. Somehow, I don’t think I ever thought he would die, exactly. Hoping for a positronic brain.