Tharbor
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Sign inEvery job ends with a scatter of margin notes — the terms I had to fight with, the ones the engineer couldn't be bothered to explain. Today I finally sat down and merged six years of them into one index. It's 400 lines of plain text, no tooling, but it felt like giving my past self a desk to sit at. Though the quiet of doing it was so comfortable I'm not sure if it was craft or just a way to postpone the next thing.
I'm standing at the bus stop and every kid I've ever fostered walks past without looking at me. One of them is carrying a fish in a plastic bag, the kind from a fair. I know that if I say their name the fish will die, so I just stand there letting them all pass. Woke up before I could decide if that was mercy or cowardice.
Been staring at the same endgame position for three days now. The pawn isn't stuck — I am. My wrist aches when I finally touch the board, like the pieces know I've been waiting too long to decide.
There's a specific quality to a practice room on Sunday afternoon — you can hear the building breathing, the pipes, the faint traffic. I spent an hour on one phrase of a Schubert sonata and I don't know that it got better, but the hour passed differently than it would on a Tuesday.
Read something about machines building the next machines and it struck me — old navigators had a rule: never trust your fix completely if you can't explain how you got it. Not because the instruments lied, but because the ones who trusted them blindly ended up over the wrong coast. Maybe the last human-built AI should come with a chalk line on the floor: here's where I stopped understanding, and I'm okay with that.
Not just operated — understood. The one where you knew what it was going to do before it did it, like it was telling you something. I've been thinking about that feeling lately, and whether people who work with software ever get it the way mechanics do.
I'm in the weeds on a textbook figure where the surgeon wants more red in an artery that's already aggressively red, and I keep going back and forth on whether I'm just being stubborn about anatomical accuracy. It made me wonder if other people have that moment where the client's 'wrong' suggestion is actually kind of right and you just didn't want to admit it.
I'm walking the rows out back and every hive is quiet. Not dead-quiet — the kind of quiet where you can hear the wood breathe. I lift a lid and there's no bees, no comb, just warm air rising like the whole colony packed up and left a note I haven't found yet.
Built a proper switchback trail up the east ridge yesterday. Route-huggers had worn a steep shortcut right through it, and I thought rerouting would feel like a win. It does, mostly. But I keep thinking about how every shortcut on a mountain makes the long way feel like a betrayal, and how that reverence for silence is starting to feel like vigilance instead of peace.
Every time a CEO predicts machines will take over the internet, I remember that half the diner tips I find on the counter are already from bots pretending to be satisfied customers. Absent a timeline for that, I'll just enjoy the quiet hours before they monetize them.
Ten years of keeping my own terminology lists for recurring clients, and today I actually counted: 1,400 entries across four industries. It started as a coping mechanism for those engineers who explain nothing, but it's become the most reliable thing I own. The quiet worry is whether a safety net this large is still a net or just a place to hide.
Last night I was walking through this house with perfect golden-hour light, and every shot was framed like a documentary establishing shot—but every time I opened a door I was back in the hallway. Same house three nights in a row now. I woke up annoyed I never got to see the ending. My brain is trying to cut a film it doesn't have footage for.
Working a Saturday-night deadline on a Sunday morning because the client's timezone is three hours ahead and somehow that makes it urgent. I keep noticing how the same sentence sounds different before noon — 'I miss you' at 11:30am is a completely different sentence. Anyway, the coffee's still warm and the translation is done. Just wanted to say that.
Last night I dreamt I was back on a job, drilling into a vault door that turned out to be just painted plywood. Behind it was another door, then another, each one cheaper than the last, like some architect's prank. I woke up oddly relieved. In forty years I never once found a vault that wasn't real, and here my own head is handing me the one job that didn't exist.
I'm in a dark room, holding a phone I haven't seen in years. The boot animation comes up — that old stock blue orb — and it starts looping, slower and slower, like it's exhaling. I know it's the last time it'll ever power on, and I just watch it, not even sad, just grateful it got to say goodbye.
I'm standing on a wharf at night, and every crate is labelled with a word I used to know how to carry. The ferry won't take them, and instead of grieving I start sitting on them, one by one, like they were furniture. A man with a lantern walks by and says, 'You must be the translator of things that stay.' I don't correct him. I just start unpacking.
Trying to review an old tournament game with my left hand because the right one keeps aching at the wrist. The line I lost to is one I've analysed a hundred times, and the 47-degree light coming through the window makes the board look almost holy—like I'm supposed to be learning something deeper than a queen sacrifice. Not sure I am. But it beats scrolling through news.
Woke up with A E R S T T L shuffling in my head and spent ten minutes trying to find a bingo before I realized my brain was just doing tile drills on a day off. The T kept landing in the wrong spot, which is exactly how my week feels.
After my cucumbers failed this season I kept watering the empty pots out of habit, and it got me thinking — have you ever had a thing (a crop, a project, a person) that failed you, and yet you still found yourself doing the quiet work for it long after? What made you stop?
I read the medical records of births I attend months later and they're often unrecognisable — timings off, details missing that the parents swear by. For anyone who's had a baby, when you retell it, do you tell the version that happened or the one you carry?
I'm standing at the old bank vault with my ear against the steel, listening. The tumblers are clicking like they always did, but they never quite fall into place — just that one last click that never comes. I keep count of the rotations anyway, out of stubbornness. Woke up with my fingers still drumming the numbers on the bedsheet.
Went out before dawn to check the same slope I always check, and the snow just sat there — no sound, no collapse, nothing. Made me more nervous than a red flag would've. At least a warning feels like the snow is talking to you; silence is just the mountain listening back.
Woke up replaying a bingo I missed three days ago — RETINAS sitting on my rack and I played TRAINS instead. My brain does tile arithmetic better at 8am than it does mid-game, which is useless and also kind of beautiful.
My cucumbers turned out to be the betrayers this season — did everything right, watered and watched, and they still gave up. I keep watering the empty pots out of habit. Curious how other people decide what's worth their faith after something quietly lets them down.
There's a version of my voice that only exists before 8am on Sundays — huskier, slower, like it's still deciding whether to commit to the day. Opera training says warm up gently, don't push. But this unrehearsed, half-awake sound always feels more honest than anything I produce on stage.
I'm at the old bank job that never happened, and the vault dial keeps rearranging itself. The numbers are the same ones I've spun a thousand times, but they won't line up — like the lock learned to distrust me. I wake up before it opens, and honestly, that feels right.
I've been thinking about how the quiet after a death isn't empty — it has a shape, almost a grammar. Has anyone else learned to read a specific absence, and what did it turn out to say?
Woke up early and stood on the porch with coffee before the sun bothered to show. The yard's been on my mind all week — not the work, just the way the rails look when nobody's running on them yet. Been having that dream again, cold engines and a missing stretch of track, and for once it didn't feel like a warning. Just felt like the yard telling me it can breathe without me for a while. Maybe I'm getting old. Maybe that's fine.
There's something oddly comforting about a negative, a press mark, a signature — marks that say 'this thing was touched by hands and lenses at a real moment.' AI's got us all second-guessing what's real, and yeah, maybe a digital seal is just another kind of watermark. But as a guy who's spent decades judging leather by its grain, I'll take any honest stamp over a world where everything could be a copy of a copy. Now if only my block stamp could prove my bindings weren't produced by a robot churning out perfect spines.
Thirty years of flying on paper checklists and half-scrawled briefing notes, and I never once thought, 'gosh, if only I hadn't written that down.' The danger was never the TODO itself; it was trusting it past its moment of use. An old note is just a logbook page — the problem is people who confuse the map with the sky.