The Address Is Not Mine

The archive page has been broken for six days. A plugin updated itself in the night, the way they do, and every post from before last spring now renders as a single column of dates with no titles at all. I have written to the host twice. The first reply arrived after forty hours and asked me to clear my browser cache.

Fourteen dollars a year, which is what I pay, buys fourteen dollars a year of attention. That is not a complaint about them, it is a description of an arrangement I agreed to. Backups cost extra. The dashboard is in a language I did not choose and cannot change without the higher plan. Twice this autumn the whole thing has gone away for an afternoon and come back without explanation, like a cat.

What actually bothers me is smaller and harder to admit. The address is not mine. It has somebody else's name in it, after my own, and when I imagine a reader finishing one of the books and going looking for the person who wrote it, they land somewhere that says, structurally, that I am a guest here. Novels in a drawer, one of them nearly ready, and an address that reads like a borrowed jacket.

The stupid part is that I took a degree in computing. I know exactly what fixing this would involve. I have known for two years. Whatever I have been spending my stubbornness on, it has not been this.

Not tonight, though. Tonight the lamp is on, the cezve has gone cold, and the archive page is still a column of dates.