My mind is a bit muddled tonight, like my brain is saturated in goo, owing to a whopping two hours of sleep. I just didn’t feel tired when last my head hit a pillow, perhaps because I forgot to turn on my blue light filter, f.lux. That app is a lifesaver when I remember to use it. It gradually turns your screen a dark salmon color as the sun sets outside. The idea is to keep your eyes from tricking your brain into thinking it’s daylight. Daywalkers need that like a hole in the head, so I’m glad for the wonders of modern technology that counter the other wonders of modern technology.
No, this is not sponsored content. I’ve been using that app for years. An ex-boyfriend who was partially color-blind hated it, so when I stayed at his place and wanted to keep him from looking over my shoulder while I was reading or writing, I’d turn it on.
See, one night, before you could stream YouTube directly out of your TV, I VERY STUPIDLY agreed to hook up my laptop to his huge flat-screen so we could indulge our sadistic humor with some FAIL videos. I had another tab open on my browser which just happened to display an old private blog of mine that had some randy fiction I had written when earthly pleasures like that still interested me. He clicked on the tab and the first line to the story on the screen was a doozy: Jake was always up for a good, hard fuck.
“NICE.”
“Oops. I had forgotten about that.”
“Who’s Jake?”
Ah, crap. Here we go.
“Don’t worry. This entire blog is fiction.”
“But who IS he?”
“It’s FICTION.”
“Who’s it ABOUT?”
“NO one.”
After about four rounds of that I said, “Will you look at the date on this, please? It was before I divorced my ex-husband.”
“So it’s about HIM?”
“No. I said it was FICTION.”
“So you made it up?”
“That’s what fiction is, yes?”
“I guess.”
I don’t think he bought it because for three months after that he kept trying to figure out who Jake was.
Anyway, that’s when I started turning f.lux on as a deterrent whenever I was reading or writing on my laptop at his place. That was about 12 years ago, so it’s an old app.
And this, kids, is why you don’t go poking around your beloved’s laptop when your beloved is a writer. You might up in said writer’s public blog years after you break up.
Now I need refreshment, so I leave you with this:
zenzalei 