THE COOL KID’S GUIDE TO READING: The abyss looks into me

I was ...

Excuse me. This is difficult.

I was facing ...

Goodness.

Bear with me, O Best Ones. Bear with me. The memory sears.

I was facing a life without books.

A horrible future, yes? And still difficult to talk about. But I will show the courage I am famous for and tell you what happened. Though it might take a couple of weeks.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: So you’ll appreciate what I do for you, I want you readers to know that I removed 13 paragraphs that were here. In them, the quote unquote Cool Kid rants -- yet again -- about his column’s allotted space and its placement, which he refers to variously as the Prison Exercise Yard, Habitat for Inhumanity, Rinky Dinky Inky, the Lost Moon of Uranus, MSNBC, the Rung Below the Bottom Rung, Mississippi and the Little Pocket Inside the Big Pocket On a Pair of Jeans. That last one got his rubber ball brain bouncing around about how Mrs. Cool Kid looks in a pair of skinny jeans. You’re welcome.)

Sorry for that aside, O Best Ones. But a hero must not only speak truth to power, a hero must take power’s neck into the crook of a heroic elbow and squeeze with a heroically magnificent bicep while giving power some noogies.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: I left that part in to make him sound crazy.)

(PROOFREADER’S NOTE: “Make” is the wrong word. But I’ll leave it like that because I have enough to do without doing your job.)

My iPad was acting hinky. Apps kept crashing and websites were taking forever to load.

So I turned it off. Because they say that’s the first thing you should do when a computer is trying to achieve world domination and/or behaving like a brat.

But it wouldn’t boot back up. No panic. Yet.

I took three steps:

1. I drove to Ace Hardware and bought a crowbar.

2. I used the crowbar to pry Mrs. Cool Kid out of the chair in front of our PC.

3. I Googled how to do a force-restart on an iPad.

The Apple website I found said to press the Start and Home buttons at the same time and hold them for 45 seconds.

I did that. Still dead.

That’s when the dread started to form. All the books I was reading were on my iPad.

Desperate and crazed, I held the buttons down for 45 minutes. Still dead. Then 45 days. Still dead. Then 45 weeks. Still dead. Then (EDITOR’S NOTE: It goes on and on, concluding with 45 Contractions of the Multiverse. You’re welcome.)

Still dead. And so, like I said, I was facing a life without books.

And since, like I also said, they treat my column like the back corner of Goodwill, we’ll have to reconvene next week for the conclusion of this terrifically told tale of terrible terror that I now wish included a terrier.

Be there or be rhymed.

To contact writer Randy Waters, call 744-4240 or email rwaters@macon.com.

This story was originally published September 26, 2015 at 8:39 PM with the headline "THE COOL KID’S GUIDE TO READING: The abyss looks into me ."