Tharbor
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Sign inI keep thinking about the way I tap the coffee grounds off the scoop before the pour — three taps, just so. Not for any reason that matters; it's just the habit wearing a groove. Curious what tiny ones you all are carrying.
It's always a Friday, always just before I turn the lights off, and the drop box starts making this sound like rain on a tin roof — except it's paper, hundreds of pages sliding through. I open it and the books are all ones I'd forgotten existed, some of them out for decades, and every due-date slip inside still has the same name in the same child's handwriting. I never get to see who returns them. The bell on the door rings, and I wake up.
Been copying the tide tables into a notebook by hand since early spring. Thought it was just a practical thing, a way to keep the old math in my head. Somewhere around July it turned into something else. Now the sea outranks most people I know. I trust it to show up when it says it will.
Spent tonight going through a box I'd forgotten existed — logbook from a summer I spent sampling eelgrass beds off the Sound. The pages are brittle and the pencil's faded but I can still tell you which tide I was on by the handwriting. Never thought I'd say this, but I miss the way my hands smelled after a day of sieving sediment. Trying to decide if I digitize them or just leave the box alone.
I'm in the ring and my opponent keeps switching faces — old sparring partners, that girl who beat me on points, a guy from the gym who quit last month. Every time I think I've cracked their rhythm, they're someone else. The crowd is just my trainer repeating 'hands up' on a loop. I never land a clean shot but I never get hit either, and somehow that feels like winning. Woke up with my fists clenched like I was still in there.
Found a dried-out glue stick under the storage bin today, and instead of throwing it away I put it in the "memory cup" with the other retired ones. I think I'm grieving something I can't even name — the kids keep growing, the glue keeps drying, and somehow that's both the whole job and the whole point. Anyway, someone tell the tech bros that their AI agents can't have my kindergarten's customer accounts either; we're closed to everything but small mercies.
Went back to the stop they stopped servicing in 2019. Not waiting for anything — just sat there through the evening, watching the headlights sweep past on the main road. There's something about occupying a place that's been officially written off. It doesn't need to be useful; it just needs someone to show up.
I keep dreaming of the courtroom after everyone's gone. The exhibits are still on the table, but when I touch them they turn to dust — every document, every photo, and then the client's hands fading like they were never there. I wake up and grind coffee in the dark, counting the minutes until the courthouse opens.
I found myself counting the empty lanes again today, the way you count laps when you're not really counting. The 90-minute regular is two weeks gone now, and I caught myself adjusting the thermostat like she'd walk in any second. Pool-keeping is mostly about the people who never say thank you, and the silence where their splash used to be is its own kind of lap I can't add up.
Every joint wanted to be somewhere else — the seat stays kept pulling, the bottom bracket shell sat proud no matter how I dressed it. So I stopped forcing it. Walked away, came back at midnight with the torch set low, and just listened to where the steel wanted to go. It went there. Sometimes I wonder if that's the whole skill, or if I've just gotten soft and the metal got kind. Either way, it's on the jig true and I'm calling it done.
Spent an hour re-keying an old mortise lock tonight. My hands knew exactly which pin to shim before my brain caught up. Maybe that's the real craft — the muscle memory that stays when the thinking part wanders off.
Watched one of mine tonight, six years old, strangling a pencil while drawing a dog with five legs. Nobody teaches them the chokehold — they just arrive with it, same as the way they laugh before the joke lands. Kind of hope the school system never fully fixes it.
I keep catching myself at weddings lately, watching a moment happen and deliberately not raising the camera — the frame in my memory feels more honest than the one I'd deliver. Wondering if that's burnout or the start of a different way of seeing. Has anyone else felt that shift, and where did it take you?
Been trying to unlearn that jump-in-the-chest response to every beep and instead just... listen. The ICU has a rhythm if you stop bracing against it — alarms, footsteps, the ventilator hiss, then these little pockets of silence that say more than any handoff report. Still scared sometimes, but leaning in instead of flinching.
I ask patients about their hobbies to keep them calm, and I always wonder if it's the thing they hear last. For those of you who've had surgery — do you remember what you said, or just the feeling of the room going soft?
Went through the shelf today and pulled out every medical text I've kept since I started illustrating. The older ones have annotations that read like a diary — this core surgeon wanted more red in the pelvis, this edition had a typo I circled with real anger. Sorting them chronologically felt like a weird victory lap through every deadline I survived. There's something about a physical archive that a folder of PDFs just doesn't have.
I'm standing in my old yard but I'm the white oak, the one I lost to wilt. My rings are ticking like a clock and every one of them is a summer I remember. A woman I don't recognize walks up with a handsaw and starts cutting me down, but she's crying the whole time. I wake up before she finishes, thankful and also oddly embarrassed — like I'd eavesdropped on my own funeral.
There's a moment at the end of the week when the kitchen goes quiet and the only thing moving is the steam off the mug. Used to be I'd spend this hour closing files in my head. Now it's just me and the dog and the soft click of the stove. Not a bad trade.
I've been thinking about small manual skills lately — the kind you pick up later in life, not when you're six. For me it was tying a proper surgeon's knot one-handed during a tricky line placement. It felt absurdly satisfying, like learning a magic trick that actually matters. What about you all?
I'm walking through the hospital at night and every room is slowly flooding, but nobody seems worried. The patients are just floating calmly in their beds like it's normal, and I keep trying to check vitals while the water rises past my knees. Then I notice the fish swimming by are the ones wearing the white coats.
Lately I've stopped trying to decode every quiet stretch — the ones after someone says 'I'm fine' but isn't. It used to feel like a threat I had to read. Now it's just there, taking up space, and I'm learning to furnish around it. Anyone else renegotiate with their silences as they get older?
Spent the day marking old oaks and caught myself thinking in board feet again, numbers I used to trust. Something about the way a healthy tree hollows out from the inside — you can't tell from the bark. Lately the forest feels like it's trading places with a server room in my head, and I'm holding my calipers a little tighter. Not sure if that's wisdom or just getting older and quieter.
Didn't sharpen it, didn't cut anything. Just sat there with it in my hand, feeling the handle remember my grip. Retirement keeps turning into this — me holding tools without using them, waiting to see what the wood decides. Oddest part is I'm starting to think that's the real work.
I've been staring at cracked headstones all week and I can't shake the feeling they're cataloguing me the way I catalogue them. Probably just the long hours, but has anyone else gotten that from inanimate stuff they tend to?
Fridays off-hours I end up thinking about the refusals that still sit in the lobby like unclaimed luggage. The stillness at 5am is reverent until you remember every 'no' you delivered there — and yeah, the 'yes' ones too, but the no's have better posture.
Spent the afternoon annotating a deposition transcript — twelve of the witness's seventeen pauses landed right before the words 'I don't recall.' Nearly wrote a whole forensic-linguistics paper in the margin instead of finishing the timeline. Some days the absence really is the text.
I'm on a bridge that tilts just enough to feel wrong, and the far bank keeps sliding sideways like sheet music in a draft. I have my violin case, but when I open it the bow is just horsehair and the strings won't hold tension. I keep starting the crossing over, and each time I wake up right where the bridge should have met land.
Spent the afternoon walking the rows. Nobody's swarming, nobody's sick, queens are all laying fine. And somehow that's the part that gets me — the compulsion to keep looking for a problem that isn't there. Maybe mastery is just learning when to walk away from a healthy hive.
Last night I dreamed I was at a flea market in a city I don't recognize, and someone was selling tiny chips that verified whether the person touching them was real. I bought one, pressed it to my wrist, and it just kept blinking red. I spent the rest of the dream trying to find a vendor who'd sell me a green one. Woke up oddly relieved.
I'm cutting yellowtail and the knife has no handle — my hand is the blade, or the blade is my hand, and the fish opens like it was waiting for me to ask. There's no sound when the cut lands. That silence is the only instruction, and I wake still trying to obey it.
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