A New Use for the Potato

I’d Rather Break My Arm Than My Apple

By Joan Opyr, 8-03-06

After I fell down the back steps. busting my ass and my Apple, my friend Debi told me to slice a potato in half and rub it on my gluteus maximus.

"It'll help to minimize the bruising," she said. "No kidding."

Is there nothing a potato cannot do? Cure warts, feed the hungry, soothe an aching ass. I know I've asked this a few dozen times already, but given the power of the potato, why is the magical, mystical spud not decorating the Idaho quarter? Why, instead, are we stuck with the outsized head of a Peregrine falcon floating above the words "Esto Perpetua" and a tiny map of our state? The bird's head is enormous. It stares at the viewer, looking as if it's doing a nasty numismatic fly-by. Cloaca open, the falcon dumps a bit of Latin, a crappy map, and perhaps a few pebbles and some mouse fur on the back of the state quarter. You don't believe me? Take a look. To add insult to injury, the state map features a star marking Boise, home of the thieving bastards who stole the state seal from the territorial capital in Lewiston. Would a potato have opened this old wound? I think not. According to my friend Debi, it might actually have healed it.

Not that the spud has done anything in particular for my backside, at least not anything I can see. It hurts to sit down, and it hurts to stand up. Everything just hurts. I twisted my ankle and sprained my wrist in the great fall. Perhaps I'll eat a french fry or two and give up on the external potato rub. French fries make everything just a little bit better.

I have not yet heard from the Apple repair guy. He's fixed my iBook before. Some time ago, I tripped over the power cord and broke off a piece of the charger inside the computer. My Apple survived that mishap and went right on working like the dream machine it is. I am typing this article on a borrowed PC laptop. It's like making love to a borrowed spouse. Sure, at first it sounds like it might be a bit of a giggle, but when you get right down to it, nothing is where it ought to be, and the unfamiliarity is not exciting. It's annoying. Computer swinging? No thanks. Mouse swapping is not for me.

I miss my Apple. I miss its shiny, original, quirky perfection. I never thought I'd become an Apple-head, but just after I went to work for New West, my PC, with its expensive, up-to-date, pain-to-download, God-knows-how-much anti-virus protection still managed to catch 75 different colds, influenza, Herpes, beri-beri, and a truly ugly Trojan horse in its System Restore. The hard drive melted, data disappeared, and it took me a good six weeks to get the blasted thing sorted. On the excellent advice of my editor, Courtney Lowery, I switched to Mac. The biggest selling point? Courtney told me that the iBook was great in bed. And she was right! I can relax on the Sealy Posturpedic and type on my iBook for hours. I am wedded to my Apple. I love it more than I love, oh, say, my arm. When I sat up and discovered that I'd broken my computer and not my radius or my ulna, I wept bitter tears. Bones heal, but what if iBook repairman cannot fix my wonderful machine? What if the drop was just too much?

I do not like this borrowed PC, and I despise the old Dell that lurks in the other room. I don't trust them. I don't know when they'll begin to smoke or choke, and I'll lose all my data. I save compulsively on a PC, having been burned many times before. In college, when term paper after term paper disappeared into the ether. In graduate school, when the dog tripped over the power strip and sent twenty-six pages worth of Foucauldian analysis straight to some hellish Panopticon. Six years ago, a melted hard drive on a PC just one month past its one-year warranty took with it the first draft of my first novel. Sure, I'd save bits and pieces on floppy disks, but were those disks readable? Out of a dozen, only one had anything on it that could be retrieved. The others were all infected with a virus. I rewrote the book that became Idaho Code from scratch.

Working on a PC is like waltzing with Typhoid Mary. It's a risky business, and that terrible cough of hers throws off your rhythm. God willing, I'll soon have my Apple back. Until then, I feel a strange compulsion to rub my head with a potato.

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