Haiku

Suppose you (or any other sane person for that matter) were to wake at 2:30 AM. A car had backfired, perhaps, or your cat launched herself onto your chest. Most of you would simply roll over and go back to sleep. Granted, this might take a few minutes, particularly if you were subjected to the cat scenario and you have to deal with a load of adrenaline, but you would do it.

I cannot. There is a tiny window for me, a bathroom window of opportunity, during which I can go back to sleep when awakened any time after about 2:30 AM. I have learned that once that little, teeny window has passed, I am not going back to sleep under any circumstances.

Thus it is that I am writing this at 4:00 AM, having moved the separate chapters of my Work in Progress (a portentious term for “Massive Exercise in Self-Delusion”) into a single document, read the news on Google, and eaten a little.

It’s not real insomnia: I am a very early riser by anyone’s standard, and waking at 3:00 instead of 5:00 is like you, a normal person, waking at 6:00 instead of 8:00. It’s close enough, though, for me to imagine the torments that real insomniacs suffer.

It was in this state that I recalled encountering error haiku some years ago. The ones I remember come from the original article at salon.com. The winners:

I’m not nuts about either one of these. In the first place, the final line of a haiku is supposed to appear unrelated to the first two, and is supposed to reveal its relation to them only upon reflection. In the second place, haiku is poetry, and it needs to feel poetic.

This one is much better, in my opinion:

The first two lines need work, though. And who remembers what Windows NT is any more? How about:

Better. I think it can still be improved.

Hmmm, the first two lines are better, but now the last one sucks.

Now we’re getting somewhere. “No one hears you cry” speaks of the grief of the receiver of the error message when his or her document is not found. It is also a general statement about the world: it is true that for most people, no one really hears you cry. “Scattered on a plain of stones” is clearly metaphorical unless you’re dealing with someone who believes it literally true (and the less said about that sort of person, the better), and it evokes a hard, pitiless, cheerless place.

Perfect.