I sometimes go to my old notebooks. I go to the shelf, pick one at random, and start to read. Mostly, it is embarrassing. Not because of what I am reading about myself but how I wrote it. One notebook I put down after I read about how I wrote about how music ‘glided out of a speaker’. Other times I read work that I cannot believe was done by me. That encourages me. If I can do it once. I can do it again. Then I get a little sad because I wonder why I didn’t keep writing like that and I wonder what it was I did to write like that in the first place.
What I will transcribe here falls into a third category. It sounded promising to my ears when I read it and I don’t know why I didn’t finish it.

I have not ever had a home other than the house my father left me in his will. It is the same house his parents left to him. I have lived in basement apartments, rented rooms, and even one condominium. But they were never home to me. Home was where I grew up. Home was where my father raised me.
I know now that by any standard it was a generous size. Over four thousand square feet, finished basement, complete with a a self contained apartment, five bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms. That part always gets me. Why is a bathroom without a tub only half a bathroom?
I had been away for almost ten years before I returned to it and I was embarrassed at my cliched reaction. Everything was so much smaller. But as I walked through the emptied rooms, it became larger. My father’s huge bedroom with the bay window, where I would sneak in and stare at the moon until I was sure my eyes had dried out. My bedroom, where I spent countless hours doing innumerable things that amounted to little in the eyes of the multitudes my father catered to. These were the faceless workmen that stayed for a week, maybe two, who my father made meals for and took money from. Of those literally hundreds of men and women, only one still remains in my memory. Her name was Electric Sarah and she rented the basement apartment for three weeks. No longer than any of the others but the only one that meant anything to my father and me.

I’m not about to say that those few words are in any way wonderful. And now that I type them my fingers remember writing more of that story but that can’t help me find the ending anywhere. It is digging up stories that start like this that get my thoughts turning in the direction of writing.

This is a letter that I have not mailed. I wrote it as a response to a problem a friend of mine had with her Dell Laptop. I started to write it as if I had been wronged, not her. Then as I wrote more, we turned into the same person. I Blackberry Messaged her to tell her I was writing the letter and she was cool with it. If she ever elects to read this, she is welcome to use it as she pleases. I enjoyed writing it.

Dear Micheal Dell,

After having spent years as a member of a productive and efficient team of office professionals who used Dell products exclusively, I chose to stick with Dell when purchasing a personal notebook computer, expecting the same reliable, high performance. As an homage to my favourite television show “The Big Bang Theory” I even considered buying an XPS, the same one owned by the character Sheldon Cooper.
I purchased it online and received my notebook computer in good time. I kept that notebook with me for the next six months. I used it for everything. It became a part of my life. Then when it started to fail, I panicked, thinking that perhaps I was the one who had mishandled it and caused it to falter. In my mind, a Dell computer had no fault. The problem must have lied with me.
It took a part time technician at an electronics supply store, an employee who perhaps is working there and going to school, scraping together the thousand dollars he would need to startup his own company, to show me that the problem was not with me, and a matter of fact, due to the care and concern I exercised when using my notebook, it lasted longer than it should have. Whatever global location that Dell sourced to manufacture my notebook, they neglected to install my hard disk drive properly. Despite your website’s confident claim that I “can rest assured that [my] computer hardware and services will be of the same high quality and reliability wherever [you] are” my notebook crashed and burned, taking with it months of dedicated work that I had saved there.
My damaged notebook and irretrievable data made me mad enough to want to take a ball peen hammer to someone’s front teeth. I remained calm, though. In my mind, at the time, Dell was a worldwide company that stood by it’s products and it’s services. Quality control is not 100% and mistakes do happen. I have worked in fields where defects are measured in misdeliveries per million, and they are only zero when measured in time spans measuring days, not the years that Dell has been in operation. I had confidence in Dell and that they would at the very least repair my machine or perhaps even replace it with a new one.
After agonizing hours of phonecalls over several days with the most remarkably unhelpful, unintelligible, unimaginably mis-named customer service personnel that ever managed to strap on a headset without strangling themselves to death before their first coffee/tea break, only to discover that Dell was prepared to do absolutely nothing for me.
Nothing.
Not a replacement, not a repair. Not even an upgraded machine, which, after the time I had suffered on the phone, attempting to decipher the inane mumblings of the person on the other end of the line, I felt I was entitled to at the very least. Those are days of my life that Dell has stolen from me and can not be recovered any more than the data on my hard drive can.
What I am left with is a hard drive-less notebook that I must repair at my cost and hours upon hours of work that I will never be able to recover and a loathing for Dell Computers that will never abate.
Rest assured, sir, that while your products and services are not worth the effort of a campaign to dissuade anyone who might possibly consider using Dell, I will never, ever have anything good to say about Dell until my dying day. That is not a promise. That is a commitment.

This is not a letter that would ever make it to Michael Dell’s Inbox on his desk – if his company even uses snailmail anymore, I don’t know and no longer care. It would be vetted by some underling who would send out a form letter telling my friend how terribly sorry they are that they could not help – as close as they could get to sending a lollipop and then sending her on her way as they could.
My computer is fine. I have a 12 year old IBM X22 that still works pretty good and a system I designed and built that will last me as long as I want it to. I tend to take things apart and put them back together again and on occasion format hard drives when I shouldn’t. No one else’s fault but mine.
But when a global supplier of electronics equipment, one among many, doesn’t follow through on their commitment to excellence, then they have failed all of us. That’s why I thought it important to write this open letter.

In short, fear is the ability to recognize danger and flee from it or confront it

I thought of my own definition of it today. Can it also be defined as not having faith in what is rational?
For example, if you were to restore a classic car. You didn’t have a plan. You just decided to tear it down and then build it back up again. Sitting in the driveway it looks simply amazing. Everyone tells you that it is amazing. You go out and call a classic car appraiser and he tells you how much it’s worth just sitting there. Let’s say it’s a staggering amount. It looks like you have done a fantastic job.
But you won’t start it. There’s more work to be done, you tell people. The exhaust isn’t perfect. It works. There’s nothing not working. It just needs to be re done. And when the exhaust is done, then maybe new rims are needed. Then, maybe find new tires. Tires that you have to hunt for, because you want to be sure to get a bargain on them and to get the exact ones you need.
But you still won’t start it. You won’t because you are afraid. You are afraid that because of the way that it looks, because of how it was appraised, that maybe something is wrong with it that you can’t fix. And then you’re a failure.
It’s easier to keep working on it. It’s easier to call it a work in progress. Besides, without a plan in the first place, without landmarks in the plan to show you how far you’ve come, you’ll never know you are done in the first place. And that could be a fear, too. Because when you are done that project, you’ll have to start another one. and if you do, it will have to be better than the one before and you aren’t sure if you can make it better so what’s the point in starting in the first place.
You don’t have the faith in the project because you invested your time and nothing of yourself. And you are afraid that if you start the car, that you might start to wonder whether or not you had anything worth investing in the first place.

In short, fear is the ability to recognize danger and flee from it or confront it

I guess when you use the Wiki definition, danger is a broad term. Sometimes, what is rational is a danger to how people perceive their world.