I write;I think;I know.

The Colour from Another's Eye.

It has to be said, I have a peculiar relationship with my technology. What brought the depth of this peculiarity to me most recently was the demise of my faithful iPod. It was nothing special, just your standard 2nd generation nano. Though that's not true, because to me it was special. It had even developed a peculiar personality all of its own; an arcane form of magick bound into its fabric.

And that's the problem. For much of my technology has become infected with similar magick. Yet in a world that only recognises magic few are prepared to accept the concequences of what I'm trying to say. Simply put my iPod died. Yet few accept that: I'm expected to regail the world with stories of how the thing itself ceased to fulfill its accepted function. But with a new set of headphones and a recharge I could still have played music. Only it still would have been dead.

So now I begin to wonder how it is that it died. Wander through the memories of days before its demise. See how I've been stomping around with a bad mood in my shadow. The feeling of their being an odd change in the air. Seen the paths I've been walking. Looking for the one that lead to the moment the iPod died. There've been a few instances where odd nuances in iPod behaviour have made me wonder, in retrospect, if it knew.

Now I see that it didn't. Yet something reminded me, in that iPod's final days, of the moments we'd shared. The dirty places in the past I hide at the back mind and what id did to help me survive. Yet as I focus my eye on the point of its death I can see the forces operating and the choice it made. The way it sent me messages about the vampires of the past which assault my mind. The vampires given life because I choose a different path to the one written by my ancestors.

An iPod became a defence against these vampires. So they attempted to infect it with their cruelty. For weeks I've been battling their evil ways. Only just managing to keep my head below the water. Then on that fateful day I found myself walking down a street I'd never seen before with hate invading my mind. Unable to defend me my iPod invoked special circumstances: it killed itself, died, stopped working. A way to force deeper more fundamental exception handlers into operation.

It's then that the deep magick broke free. The kind of thing that calls into doubt so much about the concept of linear-causality. The kind of thing which pushes me into a realm I can see is more than the brief psychotic episode it would sound like if I tried to tell you. Suffice it to say the connections were a lot stranger than discovering an iPod featured on the front page of the news on the very day the magick jumped into my replacement iPod: a grey 4th generation nano now with the spirit of a ghostbuster firmly embedded in its soul.