The triumphant return of...

Some of you may know that a few months ago, I learned that my computer had a virus and I foolishly wiped my hard drive assuming that all of my files had been safely backed up online via Mozy.com only to realize later that any project files such as those that would open with my DAW software like Sony Vegas or my sequencers (like Reason and Fruity Loops) or my notation software (Sibelius) were gone. Gone with the effing wind.

When I ultimately came around and assessed what I was missing, I felt a bit of despair, thinking that I'd never be able to start from scratch on half of those pieces. Some were just ideas that were never printed or saved in pdf form; the only form of them still in existence was hidden somewhere in my memory. Some had been finished, printed, saved in pdf, posted on the internet on sibelius.com, performed and recorded, but without the original file I couldn't edit them without having to input the entire score into Sibelius all over again. I was a bit angry, a bit sad, a bit forlorn.

But I didn't want it to get me down. A valuable lesson was to be had. One that half of you are probably going, "yeah, duh!" about. And I know. It's a lesson I've even "learned" before this. Hell, every college kid who's ever lost a term paper has gone through this. But I stopped degrading myself about it pretty early on and decided I was going to keep moving forward and accept that all I really lost were some records of ideas I had once and that my new songs would be better. I got all philosophical about it even, saying that maybe it had to happen so I'd want to write all new music and could let go of all the old ones I never finished. A kind of renaissance, if you will.

You ever have one of those moments though when you're sitting around drifting in your own thoughts and then one swims by you, a quick flash of a memory, and you say "holy shit, wait a minute! oh yeah!" It happened once when I realized, shortly after reading about the health benefits of garlic, that I had tried to cook garlic using, for the first time, a ceramic garlic baker that my brother had given me for Christmas and that said garlic was still sitting in the oven...two weeks later. Yeah, I don't bake all that often and at that time, I was baking some Brussels sprouts with caramelized onions (a favorite dish of mine). So when they came out of the oven, the garlic completely slipped my mind and hence, it ended up staying in the oven for two weeks until I had that flash and came home and checked it. Well, similarly, tonight I had a flash, a vision of a CD spindle full of data CDs. After the last virus, Windows wouldn't start up at all so I had to use a universal boot disc to get back onto my hard drive and back up my files before I reinstalled everything. I made a few backup CDs before I resorted to a backup hard drive that I had laying around. I just knew that the spindle of CDs that flashed into my memory had to still exist somewhere. I had a small moment of despair again, though, when I had yet another flash of me tossing out, err, recycling piles of stuff after moving to Brooklyn and saw CDs in that pile.

At any rate, I got home from work that morning and went through all the CD spindles I could find in my office/bedroom/creative space (they're all the same room). Nothing. Well, not nothing, but most of them were blanks. I had almost given up and, last I spoke to my dad, I half heartedly told him to keep his eyes peeled for any CD spindles I may have left at their place.

Anyway, a few days went by and this evening, I was placing my clock radio on my bookshelf away from beside my bed (the same book that was telling me about the health benefits of garlic was warning me of the dangers of electromagnetic radiation), and I saw it. A spindle full of CDs sitting on top of The Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness box set. My heart lept and, though my cousin probably thinks I'm weird, I, in a fit of excitement started dancing around the apartment, calming myself eventually to sit and thumb through them all. And wouldn't you know? On the very bottom of the stack, well two CDs from the bottom (enough suspense already!) was a CD labeled, simply, "Scores."

I haven't been this happy in a long time. Another victory dance.

I went through the disc immediately and found a lot of things that I was hoping I could revamp, a lot of things I know I might need to edit and so much more than I realized I had backed up. Of course, there are a few scores that I've made since moving up here (well one big one really, the hard copy of which is still sitting beside me as I type this), that were not on the disc because it was made in the fall of 2008. But it's enough. It was really like finding a bunch of old friends that I never thought I'd see again.

And anyway, as for that score that's sitting beside me in hard copy, I can always scan in it to get a head start on reentering it because I own this program.

So, the moral of the story? Backup your shit, backup your shit, backup your shit. Because there's nothing like being able to say, "F#$@#% you virus! Haha!"