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GlitchesSeptember 28, 2005 Help! If you by most fortunate chance happened to download my September 26 blog, "The Joy of Protest," would you send me a copy? * * * Monday night this website and a bunch of others were moved to a bigger, faster server. Something glitched: I couldn't access the site for hours, and when I finally got there (where's "there"?) Tuesday morning, the most recent blog was dated Sunday, September 25. I was sure I'd written something on Monday, but it took a few moments to remember what. Last night I went to upload a late-night blog: "This page cannot be found." I hit the Back button, but my blog had disappeared without a trace. After three months of hassle-free blogging, I was face-to-face with just how woo-woo this whole online thing is. Most of the time your words get to where they're going. Other times you might as well have entrusted them to the Flying Dutchman. Cyberspace: There's no here there. Writing is just as weird. If it's 10 o'clock and I don't know where my blog is, that's OK, because I don't know where it came from either. Last night's I don't mind losing: it was one of those improv journeys that fumbled and floundered and didn't resolve to my satisfaction. An early draft of something I'll get back to later. (For the record, it was about drinking beer on horseback; you can see the picture that inspired it in Allie's photo gallery.) "The Joy of Protest," however, Monday's effort, left some pangs behind. Reports of Saturday's march on Washington got me to reminiscing about my first national demonstration, the Mobe march of November 15, 1969. I've written about it before, and will surely write about it again; all the raw materials are still in my head, composting away. I did like the way this one came out, but plenty of theatrical and musical improvisations have happened when no tape was running. If you weren't there, you missed it for good. Most people survive the experience. Even if no one hears them, those peak moments live in the bodies and memories of the performers: you get to one mountaintop once and the odds are pretty good you'll get to another one eventually, and the second (and third, and fourth) will be easier to find, although they'll probably be higher than the last. Nothing is really lost, even in cyberspace, where maybe it never actually existed in the first place. Besides, the glitch tally for the last 24 hours is running in my favor. Yesterday I tried to use the copy utility on my scanner. Scanner went through all the motions, but the papers that came out of the printer were blank. I checked all settings, then rebooted: same result. Uh-oh. My last scanner died without warning: Morgana IV couldn't find it even though I could see it sitting in the usual place. Was this one pulling the same trick? Later on, back from the barn, I tried again. Inexplicably it worked fine. All who wander are not lost. A job I sent to New York reached its destination on time; a job New York sent me arrived ditto. The Women's Review of Books editor liked my vampire review; it took less than five minutes to read through the lightly edited copy and make one small change. But the day's big accomplishment was gathering the coffee-stained and long-neglected printouts of parts 1 and 2 of The Squatters' Speakeasy, along with the handwritten notebooks that the printouts were typed from, and reading part 1. Not only is it alive, it's telling me what to do. This is a relief. Words disappear without trace in cyberspace; on paper they're more easily retrievable (even if it's lost, you're pretty sure it's somewhere, as long as you didn't burn it in a fit of pique), but the juice can drain out of them during periods of long neglect, and reinfusing the juice is less like recharging a battery and more like squeezing toothpaste back into the tube.
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