Special Saturday Bonus Piece (You Lucky Bastards)
I was about to publish Thursday's Daily Refill. All that was left for me to do was assign it a category. I went to click on "Occult Mysteries," but it wasn't there in the list. "How odd," I thought. "I remember creating that one for Tuesday's piece, just two nights ago."
So I went to the list of all my posts to see if I had somehow posted Tuesday's piece in a different category completely--and it wasn't there at all. Neither was Wednesday's piece. I certainly remembered publishing both pieces, but neither seemed to exist.
Now, here's something you probably don't realize: right now, I publish every Refill twice: once on Daily Refills and once on the Free Refills homepage. My intention is to figure out how to make everything that gets published on Daily Refills show up automatically on the homepage as well, which I'm sure isn't hard to do, but so far I haven't taken the time to find the plug-in that will do it. So for now I'm still publishing in both places every day.
I went to the list of pieces on the homepage, and neither Tuesday's nor Wednesday's piece was there, either.
At which point I fell into a state in which I questioned my very grip on reality. I was sure that I had published the pieces. I remembered doing so. I keep the same pattern every day: I publish first on Daily Refills and then immediately on the homepage.
"Maybe," I thought, almost literally dizzy with confusion, "I only think I even wrote those pieces. Maybe it all was a dream." But no. I took a quick glance at Emacs, and there were the files for each, in exactly the state I remembered them.
I was pretty distressed. I don't miss publishing days. It just doesn't happen. Since I started daily publishing back in the spring, I haven't missed a day.
In a daze, I reposted Tuesday's and Wednesday's pieces. I checked later and they were still there. Last time I checked, they still are.
So what happened? Well, one thing I am sure of is that I didn't somehow fail to publish the pieces. I could imagine forgetting to click the "Publish" button--but not four times in a row. We can safely disregard that possibility.
So what does that leave? Some kind of server-side glitch? A hack into the website? Both are possible (and you can rest assured that I changed my passwords).
But I doubt that's what happened. For two weeks, I've written about the mysterious disappearances of possessions of mine. I've written about trickster gods and house spirits and their rambunctious play in the fields of our lives. So maybe, just maybe, they're just trying to confirm my initial hypotheses. "Those missing shirts?" they're saying. "Oh yeah, we have those. In the meantime, count your possessions closely, and make sure you keep backups of all your files."