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I have friends. Good, loyal friends who never have to be blackmailed into helping me build a monstrous computer. One blob-u-lous glob of zipping electrons that zip and pop faster than that dinky little Tamagotchi Pet you call your laptop.
What are you going to do with it? They asked me.
I restrained myself, heroically, from using their names in this, or any other post, so I will merely say that I told them the Truth.

So why all the processing power? They asked me.
Because people only respect the biggest swinging dick in the room, that's why. Smaller, stronger, faster, cheaper, right? So I need the reader to experience the humiliating pain of inferiority before swallowing the geyser of truth I’m spraying in their eyes and all over their frontal lobe.

So here it sits next to me, close like an old dog, humming softly and slinging electrons around in a chaotic orgy of light and power, toppling forests of tiny magnets like an insane alien making crop-circles to remember the milk. Each word slapping you in the retinas like a five year old armed with a laser pointer. Except I am said child and my laser pointer is a computer that can eat its weight in carbon offsets faster than Joey Chestnut can porn-star a hotdog. Meanwhile, your tiny Second Brain is being carried around like a flattened Chihuahua, while your First Brain saps the batteries trying to think of something important to compute while your Starbucks is still hot and someone might be looking at you. Sure there are children in Asia that can do your taxes faster on an abacus, but even adding all the computing power you touch each day, you would still be left crying over the measuring tape, long after everyone stopped booing and throwing food at you.

Give up. ‘Everybody hates a quitter’ simply is not true. We love quitters. Okay, well that’s not entirely true. We love winners, and no one makes winners faster than quitters. That’s why I tell people that if life were a race, I’d want to beat them to death. My weapon of choice would of course be this digital beast I affectionately call Machine.

Machine is currently running two different basic cable channels in two different windows somewhere on the three flat screens. I know somewhere behind one of any army of open programs I’ve left World of Warcraft running, at least a couple of virtual Operating Systems, and a flight simulator that is currently telling my feedback enabled chair that I’m experiencing some mild turbulence. Machine likes it when I give it something to do while I write. Otherwise Machine auto-saves every character as I type it, tries to respell slang, and once it attempted a bold re-wording of a blog post that I had to beat out of it with a few hours of Windows Vista and a little revenge urine in the processor coolant.

One of these days I’m going to squeeze and shimmy this beast into a mobile home of some sort and make people flee. It’s too large and unwieldy to move easily, therefore assuring it’s own safety from theft. For awhile, when it was still growing, Machine resided in the gutted shell of a vending machine that actually tipped over and killed someone once. I wanted an ornery son-of-a-bitch computer and I got it. Don’t stare too long; it has a nasty bite.

I have a friend I call Machine. My other friends are afraid of it and they helped make it. Machine thinks they are kind of the Mom in the relationship. Dad says it's bed time but Machine wants more TV. It’ll rot your brain, Machine! Well, I could go for some too. Too bad there is nothing good on.