It’s dark in the mornings again, so I’m back to prepping the coffee at night and sitting in the dark house for the short run before people start waking up. My wife will also be up early (already is today), but she’ll go straight to the office and get to work.

I was up much later than usual two nights ago, having attended one of those themed parties where I was the only one who showed up and everyone (still just me) had to get a new modem and router configured before they (I) went to bed. Everyone else was already sleeping.

We have moments at home now when four of us are on different Zoom calls at the same time, and it shows. What’s a fella to do? I upgraded the Internet service to a 1 gigabit plan, a large increase from our previous plan of 250 megabits. I found out tout suite (not really using that properly) that our modem was not robust enough for a gigabit’s worth of sauce, so I put my googlefingers to work, found a modem/router combo that would represent egregious overkill in terms of bandwidth capacity, and Amazonned it up. The new modem powered up nicely, then at some point when I wasn’t looking the lights all went into an epileptic episode of some sort, which I found through a quick internet search indicated a thoroughly bricked status. Pack it back up and return it, wait for the replacement.

Replacement arrived. (And keep in mind the beauty of this all taking place in a space of 3 days, with no shipping charges) Finally, Wednesday night, my wife wrapped up her meeting with her team in India at about 11:30 and I got to work on installing the new goods. Modem did great. Comcast cooperated. The router resisted. At about 1:00 am, I plugged the old modem (with built-in router) back in and went to bed. I’ll get back into that crap this weekend. For now I just want to mow the lawn and spread some grass seed. The weather’s perfect for it.

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I hear the President has tested positive for COVID-19. This should be…another chance to be disappointed in just about everybody.

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I just deleted several paragraphs because I remembered that I got in trouble a few years back for writing about something related the boy’s school (at the time, the girl was there as well) which violated their policy for people volunteering at the school. I did not know because I had never been shown said policy, but ignorance is no excuse, and all that. But in that instance there was a sort of socio-political slant to what I had written – and not the approved slant, at that – so I had to remove the post. I didn’t like the censorship vibe, but I read the policy and she was correct – I had violated it. No use kicking and screaming.

It was a post I had written on 9/11, I think in 2018, briefly lamenting such things as false sincerity and weaponized compassion. It contained this picture and this poem (and I’ll leave it at that):

Pictures of Churches

I just want to take pictures of churches
and say nice things.
To listen to autumn.
To listen to wind.
To stop saying sorry - 
I didn’t mean to offend.

I just want to take pictures of churches
but not with my phone.
With a childish foresight.
With a childish need.
With a long-lonely longing
to be whispered to sleep.

I just want to take pictures of churches
and say nice things.
I want father to hear them.
I want mother with me.
I want these thin thirty years
to fall into the sea.

I had been working for a very long time on another poem that I was going to release on 9/11 this year, but I forgot. It’ll have to wait until next year, which is for the best because it really isn’t ready anyway.