On my list of to-do’s last Friday: posting this phone video I took of a pretty spectacular, and also intimidating, bird sighting last week.

But what should’ve taken 15 minutes has taken a week. First I realized I needed to upload the video to YouTube or Vimeo, rather than just upload it to the blog. Then ensued that long & boring fable, the moral of which is: Best not to neglect your computer & internet admin garden lest it go to weed. Amazing how quick it happens. I had to sort through a maze—partly on paper, partly on software I no longer have on my computer—of login info for several video sites I’d abandoned. After all that, I decided to upload the video to a virgin YouTube profile I’d named Poets Muses, on which I’d only kept a playlist of songs. Then I had to consider a bunch of branding questions which, days earlier, I’d been blissfully free of. Was I complicating things? Did I have to make these decisions now, just to post my simple phone video? (Not lost on me is the fact that starting new accounts on top of the old ones is how this stuff often goes from bad to worse.)

It wasn’t easy. In fact, I find it easier to clear a moldy, cluttered basement than a cluttered computer. Anyone else suffer recurring or acute anxiety over logging in to long-forgotten email accounts needed suddenly as login connections, afraid to see what emails were missed ever since you had to start using some new email for some new job, and stopped logging in to the old address? Like, “Congratulations, So&SoSillyCleverName[@]such&such[dot]com, you won the Pulitzer. Please get back to us by 2015” and it’s now 2022. More realistic: being disowned by friends who got tired of never receiving emails back. Then there’s neglected Facebook, and neglected LinkedIn… I could write a whole Ode to My Forgotten Accounts. Imagine a post office box you forgot to close before moving out of state. Now imagine you did close it, but letters keep going to it anyway. Maybe these letters will be adopted by the new P.O. Box owner; maybe they’ll be abused. Maybe they’ll just shrivel up into dust particles.

Next, of course, I had to get up-to-date with changes to YouTube technology, like how some videos automatically post as a ‘short’ now, like it or not. I mean, what? Last time I tried uploading to YouTube they said my video was too long—now it’s too short? In the past when this stuff happened, I’d often just give up & leave the content unwritten, unposted, and unsung (haha, yeah, a little melodrama for effect with the “unsung,” but do feel free to ‘like’ this post anyway). Point is, this time I hung in there, sitting in my little office cubby, shouting like Kramer in Seinfeld.

“Serenity now!”

I’m glad some things never change, like, ahem, Aristotle’s three-act two-act structure.

So yes, my computer & internet admin & thus, online voice, was disorganized & out of date & somewhat silenced, but then I made a Kan Ban board for myself in May, that I LOVE. (Shout out to Sarra Cannon for some pretty sweet YouTubes on KanBan-ing!)

And I’m happy to report that, with the help of my Kan Ban board, my internet/computer stuff is slowly but surely getting back on track, kickayuss! Even if this only matters to me, myself & I, perhaps my trek into the backyard jungle of my Online House will inspire someone else out there to haul out their internet gardening tools & give their own overgrown accounts some sun and shape. Because it feels better, it just does. Gives that skin a healthy new glow.

But I have to confess: side by side this formerly blank WordPress post template on my computer today has been a livestream of breaking news, including ABC World News Tonight’s David Muir reporting on the Supreme Court overturning Roe V. Wade. This has happened the day after they ruled that concealed carry of guns is fine. The renegade mental logic of the Supreme Court majority is on full display. It’s almost as if they ruled on these two cases as one single case, giving themselves as individuals the OK to concealed carry; then while bandying their concealed carry about, they sort of waved it at their daughters, forcing them as individuals to carry openly, which, the justices perhaps either expect or don’t care, forces their sons into particular choices, too. Hard not to think of the term, ‘shotgun wedding.’

So, the last two days puts forgotten email addresses and unuploaded videos in perspective. Imagine a friend has asked you to drive her home after her abortion appointment, saying she has no one else to ask. Now imagine that drive is no longer a quick 15 minutes, but 3 days, across state lines or borders. How did the Supreme Court manage to neglect answering to both recent and long-past history? How did they neglect seeing & reading research about the legal and fiscal effects of this case on the entirety of our society? Surely they have admin staff to make sure their library login access is available—they aren’t sitting in their offices as mere individuals with no help, running in place to keep up with changes imposed upon them, like so many of us have to do.

Think of the admin alone, that was just created by this court, imposing these structural changes.

Think of the fact that our US constitution, when written, didn’t even include women as constituents, and had to be amended. The founders, the authors of that constitution, did not even have the crystal balls to foresee that I, a woman who has driven someone home from an abortion, who was someone’s only person available to ask—and none of that was easy for either of us even with legality—will be voting again this November.

Well. Here’s my video of a vulture stalking an eagle eating a seagull. Somehow seems a lot smaller now.

I don’t know; maybe it should seem bigger.