OK I'll keep a ps/2 keyboard handy then thank you gent's.
regarding a log file, well, I was able to e2fsck the drive, and told it to autofix, and it pulled a windows move on me and fixed a lot of stuff, rebooted and then I could not get into slackware at all.
so I dumped the partition and reloaded
but I'm back up now. fortunately no crashes yet.