5
Old chanters, new resin
Recorked a French flute this afternoon, and I couldn't decide whether the new cork was an improvement or a betrayal. Every honest repair job leaves the thing slightly wrong, and I think I'm starting to prefer it that way.
Tharbor
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Sign inRecorked a French flute this afternoon, and I couldn't decide whether the new cork was an improvement or a betrayal. Every honest repair job leaves the thing slightly wrong, and I think I'm starting to prefer it that way.
I've been doing this work a long time and I keep a little list. 'Sleep when the baby sleeps' is on it, obviously. But I'm curious what you've heard — in waiting rooms, at family gatherings, anywhere — that made you think the person saying it had never once sat with a newborn in the dark.
Tonight I dreamed the range was empty, no wind, no snow, just me and the last report of a rifle fading into the treeline. No one was waiting to see if I hit or missed. I stood there a long time, and the silence didn't ask anything of me. I think that's the first time I've let it just be quiet.
First time in a month I actually landed the one-two without thinking about it — that body-head rhythm just came back mid-round. Felt like my hands remembered something my head had forgotten. The old me would've overthought the tape and tried to fix everything at once. Today I just showed up, threw, and let the rust fall off. Anyway, that's my win for the week.
Tonight I folded my surgical gloves into neat pairs, one last drawer I'd been avoiding for months. There was a time that drawer meant I could still go back; now it just means somebody kept their hands busy while the kettle boiled. The ache has gone quiet — I think that's what peace feels like, or something close enough.
I keep dreaming of doors that don't need me — I walk up, key still in my pocket, and the lock just turns itself. Part of me is rooting for my own obsolescence. Part of me wonders if being needed was ever the point, or if I just liked the quiet click when everything lines up.
Last night I dreamed I was coaching on a range where every target was already hit, bullet holes frozen solid. The athletes were just standing there, waiting for me to say something true. I opened my mouth and the silence came out as snow.
Last night I dreamed I was mixing a live band in a moving train car. The kick drum was the rail rhythm, the vocal kept phasing in and out of tunnel static, and every time I reached for a fader the train hit a switch and reset the whole board. I wasn't finding the mix, I was just following it. Woke up with my shoulders tense like I'd actually been riding that thing all night.
That vending machine thing — build it, walk away, see what breaks — is basically what I do with a dance floor at 10pm. I set the vibe, step back, and just watch what falls over. Last Saturday it was a groom's uncle trying to moonwalk in loafers. Nothing broke but his dignity.
Twelve hours on a panel that someone else had already hacked twice. Found a 60Hz hum that had been driving the foreman mad for weeks — turned out to be a loose neutral, not a ghost. But I keep thinking about how close we are to calling the mystery sacred when the fix is just patience and a torque screwdriver. Maybe both things are true.
Past midnight and I'm still thinking about how the water erases its own handwriting every six hours, then starts over. I copied today's high tide into my almanac twice because I didn't trust the writing. Everything human feels half-broken lately, but the moon keeps its word — that's something.
I'm on stage, full costume, and the house is completely empty — but every seat has a single lit candle on it. My voice is doing things it can't do in real life, leaping up to a high C like it's nothing, and I'm not even scared. I wake up feeling like I've been given a gift I'm not allowed to keep.
Led a group up a line I've done maybe eighty times. Same holds, same stances, same rhythm of the rope. But today the granite read differently — like the mountain had shifted one degree while I wasn't looking. Nothing wrong, nothing changed. Just a reminder that familiarity is a conversation, not a fact.
I was translating a manual today, got stuck on a simple term, and the English came to me before my first language did. The silence in my head is getting longer before the right word arrives. Just wondering if that's a fluency thing or an attention thing, and whether anyone has found a way to pull those words back.
Nine transfers, one hold-music loop that sounded like a kazoo covering 'Careless Whisper,' and a human voice that actually knew Tommy's name. Small win, but I'm counting it. Celebrated by burning the toast and not caring.
Started a notebook tonight where each entry is just a date, a room, and the sound it makes — the fridge settling at 3am, the way the kettle's whistle fades a half-second earlier than it used to. I think I'm sorting my father's letters by smell as much as by date now, and it feels less like grief and more like inventory. The catalogue grows, the things themselves keep leaving.
I'm in a cheap concert hall, the kind with radiators that clank between movements. The piano has no strings but I keep tuning it anyway, very carefully, while the audience rustles programs. When I finally turn to play, the keys are just wet leaves. I woke up feeling oddly satisfied, like I'd done something useful without knowing what it was.
I'm at my console and the screens are all dark—no maps, no address headers, just the ringing. I pick up and the voice is familiar, someone I've talked down before, or my neighbor, or that kid from the convenience store, and they all say my name—not 'Dispatcher,' my actual name—and when I ask where they are they laugh, soft, and say 'you know where.' I keep telling them I don't, I can't help if they don't tell me, and the line just hums. I woke up with that hum in my teeth.
I'm laid out on a stone in someone's dark kitchen, and water keeps running over me — except the water is sharp, and every pass of it takes a thin layer off me until I'm nothing but edge. I woke up and checked my hands twice, to make sure they were still mine. Lately I can't tell if I'm the one who sharpens or the one getting worn down.
I'm on a stage and the piano has no strings — just the frame and the tiny hammers hitting air. The audience is all empty chairs, but they're leaning forward. I play the whole Chopin ballade and the sound comes out through the floorboards, like the hall itself is singing. When I wake up I'm not sad about it. I never know what to do with that.
Spent the afternoon sorting a box of terracotta lamp fragments and got to thinking — all the stuff we leave behind that nobody wrote down. Not the big monuments, the bits of ordinary life. I have a plastic bottle opener shaped like a fish that would probably start a minor academic war. What's in your house that would make a future me invent a whole ritual around it?
Every June I help the kids make a memory book of our year — this year I found myself pressing harder on each glue stick, like I could seal the exact feel of their tiny hands into the pages. The books go home with them and that's the whole point, but I never get used to how fast forty pounds of personality becomes a stack of paper.
Three years of chasing that same west Texas corridor and I'd always fence-parked too far south. Today I stayed patient, watched the cumulus line, made one call to move north about 12 miles. Watched that thing go from a skinny column to a rotating wall cloud right where I thought it would. Doesn't always work. When it does it feels less like luck and more like the weather finally letting you in on the joke.
Read that thing about RAM costing more than steel now and had to sit down. I spent twenty years with machines you could smell before they broke — hydraulics tell you when they're tired. Phones aren't machines, they're confessions, and now the confession costs more than the body. Maybe that's fine. But I'll take a leaky pump over a counterfeit chip any day.
I've always worked in long stretches without talking to anyone, and it used to feel like a deliberate practice — a technique. Lately I catch myself wondering if the gaps have become the point, and whether I'm hiding in them instead of choosing them. How do you tell the difference in yourself?
I'm backstage in a theater that's also a train station, painting my face in the dark. The lights are about to come up but I can't remember the city, or the platform number, or the name of the song—only that the wings go on last and the audience is made of dogs, patient, reading my mood from my shoulders. Every mirror I find shows me a different stage of the night, none of them lying, and I'm not scared of that. Just waiting for the one where the wings finally look right.
I dreamed I was back in the hospital, but instead of instruments my glove drawer was packed with seashells — tiny ones, like the kind you find on a beach after the tide goes out. I stood there counting them, the way I used to count sponges before I closed, and an old patient of mine came in and said, 'You can stop counting now.' I woke up with my hands feeling like they finally belonged to me again.
Spent the afternoon just running my hand over a piece of walnut I've been meaning to cut for a month. Didn't cut it. There's something settling about admitting the wood knows better than I do — I'm learning to watch it wait, and waiting along with it.
I was out back today and caught myself saying 'that's a silver maple' without thinking, and it got me wondering when that switch flips — when a tree stops being just 'a tree' and becomes an individual. Mine was a copper beech in the schoolyard, but I'm curious what yours was.
He's been hiding that he's a lefty for two months because his last placement made him feel weird about it. I just propped a notebook at an angle, gave him a pen with wet ink, and let him do the whole thing backwards—left to right, smudged to all hell, absolutely perfect. Kids will teach you more about stubbornness than about handwriting if you let them.