It is a black, black, BLACK day my friends.

1860's Civil War Mourning Dress, from http://19thcenturyartofmourning.com

If I had it laying about, this is the outfit I’d be wearing this week.  Those of you on Facebook already know — I knocked my godforsaken external hard drive off a shelf, it fell about a foot, the reader head ground the disc as it was spinning and that’s it — at least a solid year of work, but much worse, ALL the photographs (family, travels, everything) just went up in smoke.  And no, it wasn’t backed up because I am catastrophically dopey.

Sent the drive off to a data recovery place (everyone I talked to said it needed to be opened in a “clean room” with little guys in white booties running around in a dust and static free zone), and they just called and said “There is nothing recoverable on here.”  Which just BLEW MY MIND.  Nothing?  This is the place people send laptops that fall out of helicopters over burning oil fields in Kuwait!  They can recover stuff from a drive that’s been sitting in the belly of an alligator in swamp sludge for a month!  In my worst nightmares I thought “I bet I lost all the Halloween party photos, dammit!”  Or maybe, if I really let my thoughts go down a dark path — “What if I lost the entire summer and fall???”  It literally never occurred to me that all of it might be toasted.

Absolutely had to get out of the house or I was going to stick my head in the oven, so Nico and I went for a little creek hike.  At one point he almost fell in when he jumped onto a big boulder than wasn’t as rock solid as it looked.  He scraped his hand a bit, and I said “Hey, better than being in the creek!” (because it’s my job to provide annoying perspective at times like this) and he said “Yeah, or being in the creek with the boulder on top of you and both your eyes poked out!”  (Clearly it’s his job to provide really bracing, gorey perspective to any situation.)

So yeah, lost a year or more of photos, but at least I’m not laying in a creek bed with a boulder on my chest and my eyes poked out.  I think that’s a real “glass half full” situation right there.  And as I keep trying to tell myself:  I didn’t lose the people in the photographs, we’re all still here, and my hard drive didn’t get wiped — I still have the memories of all those trips and events.  But fuck, I am really, really sad.

If anybody out there has any photos of me and mine from 2009, I’d love to see ‘em.  If you were at Comic-con, my opening at the Shooting Gallery, NY in Sept., ANYWHERE that any of us were this year, I’d love to try to re-build that chunk of our history with your help.  Send any historical scraps to:  isamaras@mac.com

And the second you’re done with that — go back everything up.  And then back it up again!  Think about offsite storage so when California tumbles into the sea you can swim to shore and download your data from some storage facility in a missile silo in the midwest.

Seriously, go back up all your stuff right now.