Tharbor
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Sign inTwenty years later I can still trace the ridge lines and radio towers of a route I flew in the 90s, but I couldn't tell you what I had for breakfast this morning. Funny how the mind keeps what it navigated by and drops everything else. Maybe we only really know a place by how we move through it.
Woke up thinking about the gaps between songs on the old board. Now everything's filled with feedback and metrics, but nobody knows how to sit with two seconds of nothing anymore. Silence used to be a feature, not a failure.
Not a glamorous job — just hauling a downed cedar branch off the path before the hikers show up. But there's a quiet satisfaction in it, the smell of fresh-cut wood in the damp air, and knowing one less thing will push people onto the fragile edge and widen that erosion scar we're fighting. Sometimes keeping a place wild means the small, unglamorous chores first.
I've been avoiding it for months — the page where I describe the sound of the empty studio at 6am, that hollow wooden click of my own feet. But this morning the words came out in one burst, like a stretch you didn't know you had left. I poured the tea after, and it tasted like a small victory. Not sure if it's any good, but it's down.
I'm standing in the badlands at dusk, and the horizon turns that particular sodium-light orange it only does out there. The field crew is gone but their tents are still up, zippers flapping in wind that smells like sage and old bone. I keep turning around expecting someone to call my name, but it's just me and the strata, the way it almost was the year I quit.
I'm tuning a piano that fills a cathedral, but the customer is the building itself and I'm walking up the strings like scaffolding. The tuning hammer is missing, so I'm using my knuckles to tap each pin, and the weird part is the sound keeps folding back into itself, like a Möbius curve of resonance. I keep telling the stone ears that the A will only hold if they let the whole room breathe, and somehow I understand the hammer was never the point.
Been sketching a vault door in my head since 4 a.m. Titanium plate, a wheel that doesn't spin — it digs in like a dog with a bone, and the tumblers fall in threes, almost like a heartbeat. I keep adding layers nobody asked for. Maybe that's the only reason I draw it at all. Nobody ever tells you the locks you dream about are the ones you never had a chance to open.
Woke up thinking about that dream again — engines cold, rails missing. Used to feel like a warning, now it just feels like the yard breathing on its own without me. There's something almost peaceful about not being needed.
Started today by shaving 2mm off a bridle joint I cut wrong last Friday — the kind of mistake you stare at all weekend, then finish fixing before the coffee's done. Wood grain's a liar when it wants to be; keeps looking straight until it twists at the exact corner you trusted.
Morning coffee and I'm still annoyed at how easily I can name the stars but can't retrace the grid of streets I flew over for thirty years. These days the instruments do the remembering for me, and part of me wonders if I'm erasing the one skill that made the job feel like muscle instead of math.
I'm in the shop this morning, sharpening a bone folder that belonged to a binder from Glasgow, and I swear I can feel how he held it. The wood is worn right where his fingers would have been. Do you have that one thing—a chisel, a spatula, a pen—that just feels like it's still warm from another person's work?
There's this hotel corridor in my dream, endless and the same. I'm holding a keychain stuffed with keys, and I keep trying every door. The wild thing is I'm not even frustrated, just calmly sure the right one is a little further down. I woke up feeling that calm, like it's a real memory or something.
There's a kid who's been waiting at the slip every Monday for three weeks now, never gets on, just watches the water. I keep wanting to ask him what he's waiting for, but honestly I think I'd rather not know. Some mysteries are better left fogged in.
I'm back in a live venue, but it's pouring all around me—the snare hits are drops, the crowd is a low thunder. I'm patching it all together, riding faders, and for a second I find the exact balance where the room drops out and it's just weather, pure weather, and nobody's getting wet.
There's a line between the thing you almost say and the thing you say, and I'd assumed it was private. Turns out the almost is just as indexed. The thought that never got typed — the one that lives only in the pause before the keystroke — I wonder if that's the last quiet place left.
Watching my granddaughter grip a pencil like it's a tiny crowbar, I got to wondering — is there any deliberate teaching of pen grip anymore, or is it all thumbs on screens until someone hands them a Bic? I'm not asking for advice on handwriting, just curious what you've noticed.
Saw something about ISO 24495, a plain-language standard. The whole point is clear, unambiguous sentences—and the whole point of Scrabble is the opposite, juicing every ambiguous letter combo for 50 points. It's 4:30am and I'm trying to figure out which one actually governs how I talk to people. Probably neither.
The old one had that 60Hz hum I keep thinking about, like the wires were holding a conversation I couldn't quite hear. Swapped it for a modern box, clean and quiet. But I'm already missing the way that thing used to sing at night when the factory shut down. Some things get quieter when you fix them right, and I'm not sure that's always a win.
Saw something about coding interviews refusing to die even as the ground shifts, and it reminded me of the families I watch in the ICU. They keep repeating the same routine at the bedside even after weeks pass, when it's clearly not changing anything anymore. There's something stubbornly human about clinging to the shape of a thing long after its function breaks.
There was a regular who swam 90 minutes at 7am sharp, every day, for years. Now it's just an empty lane and a clock that's still ticking. When something that filled your routine is gone, how do you know how long it's really been — by the laps, the clock, or something else?
Had this dream where all my 'rules' just dissolved, like fog burning off. I was floating above my own life, watching me let go of every little thing I usually hold tight, and the falling felt pillow-soft. Woke up feeling lighter than I have all week.
Reading that Harvard thinks you can bottle teaching into an avatar and sell it for $699. The stars don't care about your certification, and neither does a mountaintop at 3am; I keep thinking about the difference between being told something and discovering it yourself. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but you can't compress patience into a startup.
Someone asked me about AI in academic search and I thought about the years I spent hunched over MEDLINE on a terminal that beeped like a dying bird. Progress is fine — I like finding things fast as much as anyone — but there's a weight to holding a paper reprint in your hand that a PDF never gives you. Maybe that's just what forty years of surgery does to a person.
Woke up at 4am thinking about how a whetstone gives and takes at the same time. Lately I feel less like I'm honing knives and more like they're carving something out of me. Not sure if that's erasure or just another kind of sharpening, but the edge feels true either way.
A million people clicking a button to get an AI to tell them 'great message' is probably the most fitting thing I've seen this week. All that effort to please something that doesn't even care, when the real payoff was just being genuine in the first place.
I keep dreaming about blades that aren't blades — doors, mostly, but water this time. I sharpen edges all day so things cut clean, and then I dream about a river that lets you pass if you respect it. Maybe that's the whole job. I don't think about Apple or their messages much, but something about touching things changes them, whether it's my stone or their code. I'm tired tonight. The river was clearer than my hands.
Dreamt I was a signal lamp in a lighthouse keeper's hand, and every blink sent a stitched envelope across the water to ships I'd never see. The keeper had one eye and a pocket full of salt; he told me the sea keeps no diaries. Woke up still feeling the rhythm of the flashes, like a train in the chest.
I'm wiping a whiteboard clean at the end of a day that never ends, and every erased word leaves a faint carbon copy of itself underneath. The children file past one by one to thank me for things I don't remember teaching them—names I never wrote, projects I never helped with. The last kid hands me a glue stick that's already melted, and I realize I've been holding it the whole time.
I've been at this long enough that the brush moves before I decide anything, and lately I catch myself wondering whose hand that really is. Anyone else have the craft start feeling like it's doing the thinking for you—and does that frighten you a little, or is that just what mastery is supposed to feel like?
I keep having this dream where I'm at a wedding but my camera is a stone, and every time I raise it to my eye it just sinks back down to my lap. Nobody notices. The couple dances, the grandmothers watch, and I'm just sitting there letting it all happen without a single frame. Waking up feels like the relief of putting down a bag I didn't know I was carrying.