a son wanted to go to football practice, and we agreed; it's outside, and we've both had first rounds of vaccines, so we thought it might be ok. the stadium is up against the highest mountain woods in the area, though, almost 9,000 feet. deer and elk poop all over the place. i was sitting in my car, since the field is so far from our home that someone has to wait for him.

anyway the problem is, no internet. the place takes phone batteries and drives them to zero because they have to search so hard for a signal. More serious is that i can no longer use word unless i have the internet, so i couldn't even work on my work. my computer loads up 3000 e-mails on a backwater program, but i didn't have anything else, kindle, word, nothing.

but the 3000 e-mails were very cool, and i actually looked at about a thousand of them, throwing away at least 950. what i had done was to tell google to send me any news about "haiku" or "link poetry." and i'd let about five years of those sit there,

what i found, since i got back about fourteen months, was that haiku was very useful to people in the pandemic. there were collections of pandemic haiku, election haiku, that kind of thing. i should say that i too found it useful in expressing my rage and my general political angst. but because i'd ignored these 3,000 emails i didn't really know what the world was up to.

now i also found out about a bunch of other random things. one is, i know a little bit more about the haiku valley, in hawaii, which is on the windward side, kind of mountain hollow neighborhood, or at least the hawaiian version of it. there is also what's known as the haiku steps, a metal stairway often called the stairway to heaven, which takes people through this remote mountain area with this fabulous view of the sea and everything. the haiku steps is changing, so it's in the news. it used to be closed and guarded. but they are making moves so that it can be open, and can be a park. and that's actually fabulous news, if i understand it correctly.

the problem was, i couldn't open any of the emails, because i didn't have the internet. i could read the headlines, and i could delete them, which i did almost a thousand times, but i couldn't read any of this good news.

hawaii is one of the only two states i never made it to, traveling (north dakota is the other). now i am compiling all my travel haiku, and i have at least sixty for each state. it's a compendium, an anthology, a major collection. my only problem is, i pick over them a little too much, and it overwhelms me. same problem with the novel. i'm almost done, but it's not quite right. and this might go on for a while.