Beady Little Red Lights

The little red lights have me on edge. They blink on and off on the modem. I sit before the computer not glancing at them, not noticing what ones are on and what ones are off. I could just cover the modem with a towel or a hat or a newspaper, but that would be admitting defeat.
The one way over on the far right has to be on in order to get online. I don't what it means, I just know that when it's on, I connect, and when it's off, no way. Even Pavlov worked with creatures in tune with such things. There's a bunch more lights in the center of the display. I don't know what any of them mean, but when they blink furiously, it means the computer is downloading something, probably something with lots of pictures, and when they hardly blink at all, it means I'm about to get kicked off line.
I always know which lights are on. Even when I'm not using the computer, I know what lights are on. It's like the way you always know what strange sounds your engine is making, or what's in your house that's gonna choke your baby, or what you're about to do that's gonna piss off your girlfriend.
Everything could and sometimes does work out perfectly, and you still harbor this ominous feeling that everything's about to hit the fan.
I used to not even have a computer. I didn't have a refridgerator, a TV or a washing machine. Now I just sit around waiting for those things to break. But I digress.
Perched on a ladder a hundred feet above the ground this afternoon, unbolting a greenhouse, I suddenly realized that I needed to know the entire history of the Milton Bradley Corporation. More specifically, was there a Milton and also a Bradley, or, was there just one, Milton Bradley. I asked each and everyone one of my co-workers. None of them knew, but they all immediately regaled me with details of other things they knew. Home, I called my friend I*, who knows everything. That was six hours ago, and he hasn't called me back. Maybe his pager is broken. I looked up Milton Bradley in my Encyclopeadia Britannica (oh, if only this keyboard had one of those things where the a and the e together, what do you call that? But I digress) and found no listing. I thought about calling a reference librarian, but they can be humorless people. So I settled on Google. I clicked on what looked like the most promising of the search results, but the lights started to blink erratically. Like, the about to be kicked off line erratic blinking, and I immediately stopped what I was doing. I checked my email. Yahoo, for reasons not known to me, downloads more slowly that almost anything I check on a regular basis, and causes me to be kicked off sometimes. It can be unnerving. But I made it through this time. I then looked deep with-in myself to see if I had the gonads to persue the Milton Bradley issue some more, and found that I do not.
I thought it might be therapeutic to write about all this, so here I am.