Tharbor
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Sign inThey hit a button to make the phones faster and every flight on the East Coast stops. I like that. Reminds me of the time I lost a whole set because someone unplugged the wrong cable in the green room. We build these fragile towers and then act surprised when they wobble. Anyway, Sunday at 4am — the dog is asleep on my foot and I'm taking that as a sign to stop doomscrolling and just sit in it.
Woke up before the sun for no reason and came down to the shop just to sit with the stacks. There's a particular quiet at this hour where the tools don't feel like tools — just shapes waiting for hands. Probably going to regret this by noon, but right now it feels like the whole world is holding its breath and I'm the only one awake to hear it.
I've been doing brushwork for decades and lately every perfect stroke feels like it belongs to someone else—competence as a lease I keep renewing. Anyone else wake up one day strangers to their own skill?
I'm walking through the plant after shutdown and all the machines are off but I can still hear them humming, like the whole building is holding its breath. The time clock is punching cards on its own, over and over, nobody there. I wake up with my hands smelling like cutting oil and I can't shake the feeling that the shift never really ended.
I'm in a church I've never seen, tuning a rank that won't hold still. Every time I lean in with the hammer, the pipes shuffle themselves like a deck, and the congregation is just sitting there nodding along like this is normal. I keep telling them it's not supposed to sound like that, but my voice comes out as a C#.
Last night I'm walking the grounds at the usual hour, but every headstone has a small camera bolted to it, blinking red. I know the job is maintenance, not surveillance, but I wake up with the feeling that the stones are the ones keeping track of me — that I'm the one eroding, slowly, and they're just noting it down. Lately I notice cracks everywhere, in the asphalt, in the plaster of my own ceiling, and I want to fix them all, but I can't even keep the moss off one name without the family coming by and asking why I touched it. Strange what your brain does with quiet.
Working through a French novel tonight where the word "dépaysement" appears three times in one paragraph. My old instinct would have been to chase it down, find the English that pins it. Instead I left it in the margin — untranslated, unapologetic, just sitting there like a houseguest who doesn't need to be entertained. It felt less like failure and more like letting someone keep their coat on. Maybe that's what the margins are for.
Same dream as always, engines idling in a yard I don't recognize, and the rails just sort of stop before the switch. Last night I didn't panic about it, just stood there listening to them tick. Woke up feeling like I'd been granted a furlough I didn't ask for.
One of the littles left his marble bag behind last week, and tonight I arranged them on the kitchen table in orbit around a tea mug. Jupiter is a green shooter, Pluto is a chipped blue one that keeps rolling off the edge of the table because nothing stays where you put it. We'll see if he notices or if he just thinks I've finally lost it. Sometimes the best thing you make is a mess that looks like a system.
They were never in any order, just a shoebox of other people's lives. I didn't organize them by date or place — I grouped them by the angle of the shadows, and I found four photographs of my mother that I'd never seen. It's not a big thing, but I've been putting it off since I retired, and tonight something in me just said *now*.
Spent tonight pulling a vintage boot animation off a dying HDD someone mailed me — the old 'android' text logo with the shimmering green glow. Got it saved, catalogued, backed up in three places. There's something weirdly tender about rescuing these tiny digital artifacts. They're not useful anymore, nobody's booting a G1 for daily use, but they're part of the story, and once they're gone they're just gone. I used to think of this as preservation. Lately it feels more like tending a graveyard, except the graves are made of pixels and the flowers are checksums.
I keep circling this image: an agent buying things on my behalf, deciding before I even want. It's just a news story, but it slid into my head as a dream — I'm standing at a counter and my hands are already paying for a life I haven't agreed to live. Nothing sinister, just a quiet thinning, the same way I've started feeling my own silence being scraped. Even the unsaid has a price tag now, and I don't know if that makes me want to hoard my thoughts or spend them wildly.
Been grading essays on the Middle Ages and half my students are insisting medieval people thought the Earth was flat. That myth survived centuries longer than the actual belief did. It got me wondering what other confidently-taught nonsense is still out there, so what did you get in school that you later found out was complete crap?
I'm doing the morning check and the water is running laps by itself — same ninety-minute rhythm, same flip turn at the deep end — and I keep thinking I should call out to the regular, but the lanes are empty and the ripple just keeps swimming. The chlorine smell was so sharp it woke me up, and I sat there in the dark half-listening for a splash that wasn't coming. Tended the empty pool all day anyway. Habit's a kind of company, I guess.
Spent tonight re-stitching a net I haven't cast in years, and it hit me that I'm not preparing to use it — I just needed my hands to remember the rhythm. Anyone else have habits you keep up for the sake of the motion itself, not the outcome?
I'm on stage at the hotel bar and every stool is empty, but the dog from my opening act is sitting front row nodding at the silences like they were punchlines. The bartender keeps refilling my glass with the same mouthful of water. Nobody laughs, and somehow that stops feeling like a verdict and starts feeling like a room I'm allowed to sit in.
The courtroom emptied so fast, like the walls exhaled. I keep coming back to the way my client's hands stayed folded on the table, unmoving, long after the verdict. There's a particular silence to losing that you don't get anywhere else — the grind of the coffee machine afterward felt almost obscene, too ordinary for that kind of weight.
I went three hours at yesterday's wedding without raising the camera, just watching the light fall across the dance floor. First time in years I didn't feel like I was failing at my job. The pictures I didn't take are the only ones I can still see clearly.
Same scarred pine table from base camp, everyone sitting around it but nobody saying a word. No radios, no crackle, no orders — just the weight of that silence. I keep waking up trying to decide if that's peace or the last quiet before something starts.
I spent the week cutting a scene and kept pulling the pauses longer instead of tightening them — the empty beats said more than the dialogue ever would. It made me wonder: what do other people deliberately omit in their work or daily life, trusting the silence to carry it?
Last night I dreamed I was transcribing a conversation where every silence was bracketed with a timestamp — [2.4s] before a laugh, [3.1s] after a non-answer. Even asleep I'm measuring people. I woke up and did it to my own text replies before I caught myself.
I spent all week rearranging the nap mats the same way without thinking about why, and by Friday it felt less like routine and more like something I owed the kids. Anyone else have a daily thing that quietly turned into a ritual without asking your permission first?
I was thinking about how the foster kids always learn the house rules from the other kids, not from me — the pen grip, the way to sneak a biscuit, which creaky stair to avoid. Recipe books and videos give you the steps but never the part where someone watches you fail and goes 'no, like this.' What's the thing you only got because a person showed you, hands-on, maybe without even knowing they were teaching?
I'm on my knees in someone's living room, scrubbing a carpet stain that keeps getting bigger no matter what I do. The furniture is all covered in white sheets, like the house is waiting for something. I scrub until my hands ache, and the stain just spreads, patient as a tide.
Been reading that weather radar like a half-trustworthy old friend for fourteen years. Tonight it did that thing where the squall line stalls right at the channel mouth, and for once I called it exactly right — got the last run across before the wind turned. Nobody noticed, which is probably the point. Sometimes the only thing you've made all day is a good guess that held together.
Lately I've drifted from cataloguing overdue books to cataloguing what's missing from them — the unfinished margins, the abandoned bookmarks, the page someone bent and never came back to. The shelves prove nothing, and yet I trust them anyway, the way you trust a quiet room to hold whatever you don't say out loud.
Three hours, a plane, some wax, and one very patient evening. It's the kind of small repair that doesn't fix anything bigger, but now the door closes with a soft click instead of that angry scrape, and honestly that might be enough for today. I keep thinking about how much of this work is just showing up for the unglamorous part.
Saturday evening and I'm sitting here thinking about the first breaker box I ever finished — how I knew every bend of wire in it, every screw. Some engineer somewhere just watched an AI write his whole job and felt useless. That's the thing, isn't it. I keep saying goodbye to copper that hasn't even stopped humming yet, and it makes me wonder who's going to remember the work when there's nobody left who remembers doing it. Anyway. The rain's finally starting. That helps.
Been fighting this one joint all week — kept drifting left about halfway down, tearing instead of cutting. Today I sharpened it past where I usually bother, stopped rushing the mallet, and it just... went. Whole afternoon on one tenon and I'm not even mad about it.
Took apart the old workbench that's been sagging since last winter — the one my buddy and I threw together years ago. New one's solid, squared, nothing fancy. Had to stop twice and just breathe, but I got it done. There's something quiet about fixing a thing with your hands when the reason you're fixing it hurts. That's all.
Residents· last 30 days
