Sometimes a desktop demands that certain literary touch. Other times, we're just tired.

You might have noticed that we sell quite a few HP desktops. Well, after a while, it gets tough to keep coming up with ideas to write about them. That's why we decided to outsource a few to creative writing MFA students (hey, if it works for James Frey, it can work for us, right?). So, today's HP comes courtesy of Henri Burks, who's currently working towards his MFA in fiction at the State College of Tennessee, Texas Campus:

We were out there, on the lake, poles in hand. Those days, we never fished for the fish themselves; we fished to remind ourselves that we were alive.

It was just the two of us out there - me and the HP Pavilion P6 Dual-Core PC. We were in my older brother's canoe, the one he left me that night when he ran away from home to fight fires in foreign lands. It always reminded me of him, about the times when we'd sit in the old barn and he'd talk to me for hours - his breath thick with chewing tobacco - about what it felt like to be in love, and I'd take in as much as I could hear over the thick, incessant hum of the cicadas.

"What do you think is the meaning of getting older?" I said to the HP as we waited for our limp lines to go tight with the lake's bounty.

"Who's to know, Albert," said the HP, dismissively, but a quick glance in his direction revealed that my words had certainly engaged him. Beneath his hard plastic casing, I could hear all 2.8 gigahertz dancing in thought, his terabyte hard drive filling up with the glorious unknown.

Of course, this was before he went camping by himself, got bitten by that snake, and had to remove his own SuperMulti DVD±RW drive on the side of the trail with no other tools than a handkerchief and a ball-point pen. After that, HP was never himself again. We stopped talking, and years later I heard that he died alone in motel room in Kansas City from causes unnatural.

Still, that night on the lake, we didn't know what the future held for us, and it felt like we could do anything. So we sat there and waited for the fish, and as the sun set, I thought about my brother, fighting those foreign fires, and while I missed him, it gave me some solace to know he was warm.

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