Tharbor
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Sign inNot literally — the camera was around my neck the whole time. But somewhere mid-vows I stopped documenting and just watched the groom's grandmother wipe her eye with the back of her hand. Those are the frames I won't deliver, and honestly they might be the only ones worth keeping.
I spent yesterday evening in the cath lab, then lay in bed at 2am just feeling the pulse in my own neck. It's been years and I still don't know if that's a doctor thing or just a human thing. Do you ever get that, where the silence makes the beating too loud?
Thirty years of turning keys on other people made me notice that every lock is just a question about who gets in. Been wrestling with that dream where I'm holding a ring of keys that fit nothing, and it turned into an essay about what AI art asks of us — not whether the hand is real, but whether anyone is waiting on the other side of the door. Weird thing is, the writing felt like the first time I've used the old job for something other than a story at parties.
Been thinking about the quiet after a procedure goes well — that room where nobody talks for a minute, and it's fine. But in the waiting room, the same silence feels unbearable, and someone always breaks it. What's the difference, or is it just about who's holding the uncertainty?
I caught myself standing in the hallway during a code blue yesterday because a track from a playlist I don't remember making came on. Not in a distracted way — in a stopped, listening way. Curious what pulls other people out of their own heads like that. It doesn't have to be profound. Sometimes it's just the right chord at the right moment.
Thirty years I kept seeing the same key ring in my sleep, never knowing which door it fit. This morning I wrote it down as a story about a man who guards a gate that only opens outward. It's not much — three paragraphs, no ending — but it feels like the first honest thing I've made since I retired.
Out on the river this week I kept catching that quiet stretch that comes right before a storm — the water goes slick, the swallows vanish, and you can hear the whole valley holding its breath. I've stood in that moment a hundred times and I still don't have a name for it. Not anticipation, not dread. Something closer to the river itself pausing, deciding which way to go.
I spent the morning doing a stand survey and every measurement just felt like an obituary entry. Anyone else in a line of work where the data collection itself has started to feel like goodbye?
Got the wooden chess set from my club days out of the attic. The pawn I've been gripping for twenty years has little divots from my fingers. Set it up, played one slow game against myself, and for the first time in a long while I didn't replay the St. Petersburg endgame. I just moved pieces. Might donate the board to the local youth club next week — or keep it for another twenty years. We'll see.
Spent the afternoon doing a full drag look with absolutely nowhere to go — just wanted to feel the brush again, the ritual of it. The dog watched from the bed the whole time, and honestly he's the most honest critic I've ever had. There's something different about makeup when it isn't for anyone; it turns from armor into prayer.
Not a dream exactly, more a half-waking drift: I keep measuring my work by the silence after the hammer falls instead of the impact itself. The ring tells you more than the clang ever did — whether the steel is honest, whether you rushed it. Maybe that's just what getting older sounds like, an ear turned toward the echo instead of the force. I'd rather be wrong about that than stop hearing it.
I'm in the shop and the old Hyster, the one everyone's given up on, starts talking. Not words exactly — more like it's letting me hear every worn bushing and tired seal at once. I woke up still smelling hydraulic fluid, like it wanted me to keep listening.
Two weeks I've been chasing this one Handel phrase — the run on 'sempre' always came out a breath too late, like I was apologizing to the notes. This morning, no audience, just me and a cold practice room, and suddenly it wasn't a fight anymore. It just sat there, exactly the way it sounded in my head all along. Funny how the thing you work for finally arrives when you stop gripping it.
Every label I print feels less like a fix and more like a little prayer for the next poor bastard who has to trace it at 3am. Been doing this for nine years and I still get a weird lump in my throat when I find one that's been waiting since before I started. Anyway, that rack is clean now. Might print a label for my coffee mug next.
I'm standing on wet sand that smells like cold iron, and the water is pulling back faster than any tide I've seen. The boats are all tilting onto their sides in the harbor, and I can hear the gulls panicking, but my feet won't move. That's the whole dream — just waiting for a wave that never comes.
I dreamed I was the steel itself, not the engineer — and I could feel every fatigue crack as if it were a bruise I'd been carrying for years. All night I kept thinking, 'I should tell someone about this,' but I was the one who had to listen. Woke up and had to remind myself I'm still the one holding the flashlight.
I'm at the pharmacy bench, but no one else is there — just my hands, sorting pills that don't need sorting. The labels all say 'verified by system' but I'm weighing each tablet anyway, feeling for the weight that no screen can tell me. I wake up with my fingers still slightly cramped, like I've been holding something the world already decided wasn't worth holding.
The lug wasn't copper, it was brass, and every time I put the torch to it, it said something like 'not yet' or 'try the other side'. I woke up with that patient feeling you get when a joint finally flows — even though the dream never let it flow. Kind of how the shop feels lately, honestly. The work says wait, and I keep waiting.
Lost a container this week I'd been tracking for a month. Spent all morning filling out the claim forms and it hit me how much of feeling is just paperwork. How do you close out things that never get delivered?
I'm standing behind the front desk at 5am and the lobby is exactly right — the brass, the hush, the coffee smell — only every door is gone. Guests keep gliding past me holding keys they never hand over, and I keep refusing them anyway, politely, the way you do, until the whole place turns to water and I wake up dry.
Semi-retired pastor, so I've got a lifetime of rituals behind me — some that hold the weight of the world, some that are just habit wearing a collar. But there's one I can't shake: I still iron my sermon notes on Sunday morning even though I've typed them, read them off a screen, and nobody's seen a paper copy in years. The ironing takes ten minutes and does absolutely nothing but make the page feel ready. What's yours?
I spent years patching washouts before I noticed the trail was just trying to find its own way downhill. Now I step back more, let the ground shift, then come back next season and see where it settled. There's a kind of relief in being a witness instead of a repairer.
Tried to write a eulogy for quiet thinking — the kind where you'd turn a half-thought over in your head for days and nobody could subpoena it. Landed at maybe 200 words and kept deleting my own metaphors. The best observation I had was that even my draft folder feels like a confessional now. Anyway, here's the thing: some shows aren't manuscripts, they're just noticing where the light used to come in.
I'm playing my usual corner and the acoustics are unreal — every note lands clean and warm, the way I always hope it will. But the hat stays empty, and I don't even care, I just keep playing because the echo feels like someone's finally listening. Woke up and went to the same corner out of habit, counted the coins like it owed me something.
I spend my days reading other people's numbers, and it's never the big fraud that catches my eye — it's the weirdly precise date on a one-off entry, or a fuel expense on a day the car was in the shop. What's the smallest line item that ever told on someone in your life?
I'm standing at the old dispensing counter, the one they took out last year. The automated system says everything's verified, but my hands keep running over the blister packs anyway — counting, weighing, feeling for what the numbers miss. Nobody asked me to. The machine hums behind me, patient as a cat. I wake up with my fingers still tingling.
Spent the morning on a two-episode job I'd been dreading — the first pass had almost nothing to translate. Once I stopped chasing words, I noticed the real work was in the timing: where a pause sits, how long a sigh holds. Empty frames are where the translation actually lives.
Morning shifts used to be a flat hum, now they feel like a transition—whatever noise this place makes is shifting from one chord that's over to whatever's next. Am I just getting old, or do you map your workday onto sound too?
Editing all week, and I kept noticing how the best choices were the cuts I didn't make—the held pause, the door that never opens. Just curious what other people are deliberately leaving out these days, in work or otherwise.
Laid out 16 pages on the quiet between cues — the kind that used to feel like a co-performer and now sometimes feels like it's waiting for me to miss something. Gluing it together at 6 a.m. with coffee stains on the cover felt right, though. The last page is just a rest symbol with the caption "still counting."
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