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Damn. I did it again.

For the second time in under a year, I've spilled something wet and nasty onto my computer keyboard, and at this moment, I'm writing longhand on the fold out table in my kitchen. In the morning I'll type up these handwritten pages at an internet cafÈ down the street, and email the finished copy to the newspaper.

I'd been planning to write something about keeping in touch, or about the little things that make life abroad worthwhile. I had it all sketched out to counteract what's thus far been a pretty negative stream of columns.

But I've scrapped that now. Instead, I think I'll probably spend the next few hundred words of my time and your life griping about how my clumsy, porridge-fisted self has screwed things up once more.

It's another one of those instants of inattention that leads to hours and days of tedious reparations; hours and days to consider how a few seconds of care could have landed you skiing or watching television at this moment, instead of standing over a still-dripping laptop, aiming a hairdryer into the open CD tray like a pock-marked father at his daughter's 'Little Miss' child beauty pageant.

It was coffee. Black, thank god, but it took less than a second to seep through the keyboard and into the tender body of my laptop.

I caught it quickly, turned the whole thing upside down like a newspaper-hat and leaned into the power button for dear life, but I still think I may have been too late to save it.

At worst, I'm out two grand and my connection to the outside world. At best, I just lost half of my next column.

Which is a shame, a damned shame, because what I had was pretty good. There were all these little jabs at my roommate that I'd managed to fit into this completely unrelated story, like how he's managed to neglect the whole of London in favor of armloads of weed, frozen pizza, and pre-sliced deli meats, all things which would impede his abroad experience further if his weekly routine included leaving his desk for food, entertainment, or communication.

One moment. BAM! All gone.

Not really 'BAM,' I guess more 'CLINK'. And then 'SPLOOSH'. Except not that loud. More 'clink'. And maybe more of a 'splishhh'. And then the quiet trickle of a single tear fixing to push through a set of bottom eyelashes.

Suddenly, I'm editing with pen in the margins of my journal, crossing huge swatches of words out in pen, and squeezing adverbs into the space between lines. I've been reduced, to an arsenal of arrows and asterixes. (As I write this, I'm not sure that I spelled 'asterixes' right, and there is no way to check until morning.)

Well. That's not entirely true.

I could use my roommate's computer. But I won't. I might accidentally interrupt some webcam conversation about a 'three-way' with his girlfriend and Janeway. When I overheard that little nugget as he shouted it at his webcam, I googled it, and Janeway is, no kidding, a post-menopausal character on the NextGeneration spinoff series 'Star Trek Voyager'.

You see? That's exactly the kind of thing my last column, the one I lost to an overturned mug, was just full of.

I've been saving that little gem about StarTrek to use at just the right time, in just the right column. When it happened, I made a few notes in a Word document so I would have these neat little awkward details, so I could fully convey the complete backward nature of this guy, but since I don't know if I'll ever see those notes again I figured I would just use it now, in case anything happened and I forgot.

The last time I did something catastrophic like this to my computer, last February, I lost seven-hundred dollars, two months, a 3,000 word English paper and my warranty.

I'm not sure I could justify another rash of expenditures to revive what has proved a perpetually sopping iBook, and so this time, it might just go the way of the horse. I mean, a dead horse. That somebody, you know, shot.

It might not come to that. My computer may not be broken. But I'll be surprised if I get out of this one for less than a couple hundred dollars.

The coffee cost a buck fifty.

And that's only because I was more careful this time. Because I handled this spill more quickly and cautiously. In truth, the very fact that I have to go on to qualify the different times that I have drowned my computer might point to some larger inadequacy, but I hope not. At least I'm improving.

The last time, that was really stupid.

Last time happened around 6:30 in the morning, right at the tail end of an all-nighter. I remember stretching and rubbing the backs of my eyes hard with my palms and looking out the window, then repositioning the screen to cut glare from the now rising sun. I didn't know it then, but that triggered a set of chain reactions, setting pencils, folders, and loose, cascading sheets of blank copy paper tumbling over each other into the middle of the desk, an exercise in momentum that finished with a half-filled glass of iced tea, and a growing puddle of spill I didn't notice until the brown water seeped out from underneath my battery compartment.

The screen went blank as the computer shut down, and panicked and hopped barefoot around the room, scrounging for anything absorbent, finally wiping everything down with old t-shirts and socks. And in a half hour, I decided it was probably safe to turn the thing back on.

Three minutes, and it was all over.

I tried again and again to boot it, but it just shorted and died. Specifically, it shorted the 'logic board' and died. The logic board is, like, the central nervous system of the Apple computer. And, like the central nervous system of a human being, it costs $650 plus shipping and handling to replace.

I don't know what shorted this time; hopefully nothing. I've got the thing propped up on my desk like a tepee to drip-dry overnight, and then tomorrow when I get home from transcribing this column, I'll check on the damage.

But I'm certain that there's something. Which means that I'll have to get used to this routine of scribbling and rescribing, transferring copy from page to screen like a 1980's novelist. Harumph.

You know, the thing about writing, actually writing on paper with a pen in your fingers, is that there's no word-count function. I mean, usually I'll have, you know, a pretty good idea of where I am, and how close I'm getting to my limit. I'll know when to start drawing all the threads together and form a nice, relaxed conclusion, you know, that sort of thing. I haven't really got much to work with here. But I've had kind of a rough night. I'm sure you can all cut me a break.