We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Program to Talk About Usernames and Passwords and Thanksgiving

I’m on the studio computer a couple of days before Thanksgiving while my wife is entertaining a friend upstairs in the living room, and in an effort to be courteous but wanting still to make progress on the music listening/writing project, I decide to listen to music in the basement and record my experience in a blog entry down there. Now, I’ve logged into the blog site from this computer before, but on this day, for some reason, the computer does not remember my username and password login. I try and fail a few times and then suddenly I’m locked out. Well, my other devices ought to remember, I think, but lo and behold, the laptop in my study has locked me out and my phone has locked me out. Now I need customer service from Word Press two days before a holiday. The principal problem, as I see it, beyond the cluster of trying to log in from a computer that no longer recognizes me, is that the email address that I used initially to set up my site, some fourteen years ago now, is currently defunct. So, any answer to a request for a password reset is forever lost inside the ether. I learn that I have become somewhat attached to my blog site, as if it were an appendage, and being locked out of it has produced significantly more anxiety than I would have guessed. 

Surprisingly, I hear from Word Press support today, on Thanksgiving morning! Clearly, there are a few hurdles yet to cross. If I’m able to publish this little blog entry on the holiday, dear reader, you will know that the hurdles have been surmounted and that more poem-like-things about my record collection are on their way, in addition to occasional interruptions to our regularly scheduled program!

Meanwhile, here’s what I’m feeling gratitude about in this moment. I am thankful for Word Press customer service. I am thankful for all the usual suspects, my wife, my son, our privileged circumstances of being well housed and fed and healthy in body and mostly in mind, my brothers and my sister who I don’t see often but love nevertheless, my close friends who all have become more and more dear to me as time passes, and that includes the musicians I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the last few years, the members of my cover band, SuperWave, but particularly, my songwriting partner Adam Fagelson in Project MA. I am thankful for music, for listening to it and for the ability and compulsion to play it with some frequency and with some amount of skill. And I am thankful for the creative urge which has remained alive in me my entire life and shows no sign of waning. Life is pretty good in here. And out there, in these United States of America, things are not so good, but I’m feeling hopeful that a sea change is out there on the horizon.