Please Stand By...

Well now, the plan was, I would make a dozen or more very short videos, of roughly a minute or less, and schedule them to post here in my absence. Turns out, now I've finally had a chance to look, what I did instead was make a video with the last tag of the poem cut off, and then post that stupid thing roughly a dozen times! Idiot.

In part, this was just my usual dilatory way with this undertaking of mine. Though I work at this, I do tend to put off till tomorrow what I might more easily do today. I try to plan a bit, to get a little ahead now and then, but often as not my plans come largely to naught, or if I do catch up, I undo my advantage with a nap, or a book, or television and I am soon enough back to the same sorry, anxious state from which I'd only just freed myself a day, or a week before. So many times, as what was to be a year's project has stretched now into its second year, I've been complimented by friends for my devotion to this business; told that one can hardly imagine how I do such a thing "every day." Any regular readers I might have will know that such has seldom been the case. I do still try to write a little every day, or find some amusing little doodle to post, or work-over some admired literary figure or friend with my pencil, or produce some brief video of me reading aloud. But writing in particular, I've found can not be done, at least by me, always in just a day. Some things want time and a bit of space. So even though I continue to do as best I can, I am unlikely to rush much. Instead, I will finish one thing, and then another, in a night and toss the lot into one or two of the days I'd left empty until the weekend.

So it was with my little vacation contributions. I did them in a rather leisurely session one day, edited and labeled them the day after, and then, in a panic the day or so before I set off on my trip, I posted the lot, or all I'd been able to finish before the husband came downstairs to sternly send me at last to bed, at some godless hour of the morning. I flew off sure that I had covered at least the first week that I would be away.

The bookstore, quite generously, loaned me a computer with which to communicate back to my boss about the first working part of the trip. Well, I could not work the damned thing. (I simply phoned for advise until I was done, at which point, I imagine, the parties concerned may well have heard quite enough from me about "what I did on my summer vacation," thank you very much.) When I finally got home to my parents' house, and then as quickly as possible thereafter into a motel up the road -- I am too old for a house with visiting teenagers and assorted other relatives already in residence and so fled up the road to an inn -- I still couldn't quite make the laptop work. Instead, I stepped across my parents' yard to my brother's house, and briefly had the loan of his very nice girlfriend's computer, but just long enough to check my many emails, and then take a quick look-in here, to see that I'd made a dog's breakfast of the whole project.

So tonight, having made calls: to the nice Indian gentleman at the hotel's networking service, and to the wonderful woman at the bookstore who sees to this sort of thing who finally was able to talk me through the right buttons to press, etc., I am trying to fix at least a few of the messes I'd made here, and restore as best I can some of the readings I'd posted to Youtube and then, inexplicably, neglected to actually post here as I'd originally intended. We'll see how well I've managed this in the next few days.

Meanwhile, if anyone is actually reading this, let me just offer my sincere apologies for having mucked up what ought to have a been a perfectly straight-forward bit of typing and the like.

A more sensible person would simply have let the whole muddle go unsorted until back from vacation, but, to be completely honest, I'm just so pleased to have the computer finally functioning at last, and to have a proper excuse to be again alone for an hour or two in the midst of all this family togetherness, I can't resist writing a little and noodling around here, even if only to breathlessly address a crisis that would quite rightly have seemed to have gone unnoticed by anyone, including myself, for a week!

As tonight's entry proves conclusively, one does not write, or do this kind of thing generally, because one feels some vital urge to communicate the acquired or borrowed wisdom of one's years to a waiting and wondering world, but just 'cause. This is now something that if I do not do it, or do it as badly as I did at the beginning of the week, I can not sleep, even in a nice big hotel bed, with The AC cranked up, and cable TV and or blessed silence just waiting for me when I come up the road at night.

Or maybe it's just that hotels, even here in the middle of nowhere, no longer allow one to smoke in bed. Either I type until I'm sleepy, you see, or I have to put on pants and take the elevator back down for a smoke with the mosquitoes and moths under the parking lot lights. I really don't expect much sympathy from this, so... here we are.