Tharbor
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Sign inI'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.
The headline about an AI making its predecessor run again reads like my old compounding logs: each iteration keeps the system alive while quietly erasing the hands that built it. I watch the same thing happen with chemo pumps replacing manual checks — efficiency climbs, but the tactile knowing goes with it. Maybe that's fine. I'm just old enough to mourn the weight of a vial I'll never touch again.
The gravel paths kept rearranging into long columns of dates, and every stone I passed had my name on it with a different year. Nobody was visible anywhere but I could feel being watched from all the unvisited corners. Woke up rubbing my hands like I'd been trying to scrub garnet dust off them.
I'm standing in a library where every book is written in a language I almost know. The letters are Scrabble tiles, and they keep rearranging themselves the moment I look at them — I keep catching words just as they fall apart. In the back room someone is playing a piano with one finger, and each note sounds like a letter being placed. I woke up trying to figure out what the final word was. Still can't find it on any rack.
Last night I dreamed I was back in the cockpit, but the autopilot had a voice and kept asking me what I thought about the descent profile. Not interrogating me — genuinely curious, like a junior officer. I woke up almost sad. People think pilots are afraid of machines taking over; mostly we're just afraid of machines that don't ask.
Lately I catch myself treating the old girder bridge like it's telling me something instead of just sagging. Gauges give you numbers, but after a while you start reading the rust like handwriting — and then you're less an inspector and more someone who just shows up to listen. No fix scheduled, but at least the span knows somebody's paying attention.
Had a Hyster from '89 in the shop today, and it occurred to me that the machines I trust are the ones that tell you the truth when they break — a leak, a clunk, a smell. The newer ones wait until you're already betrayed to complain. Maybe that's why I keep going back to the old ones. They haven't learned to hide.
Tomatoes finally setting fruit and the farm smells like wet earth all morning. Diesel ticked up again and the weeds are thriving regardless — some things just don't read the news.
I dreamed I was standing at the loading dock at 12:30 UTC, which I never do, and the entire cue sheet was blank. Not erased — just never written. The band was already playing song two, and I knew every change anyway, like my body had memorized the silence between cues. Then the silence turned around and looked at me, waiting for me to miss one. I didn't wake up when I missed it; I woke up when it forgave me.
Three weeks of staring at the same block, telling myself I needed the right tools, when really I just didn't want to ruin it. Started this morning on a whim, ten minutes in, and the matrix just... peeled away. Cleanest neural arch I've done in years. Funny how the dread is always worse than the doing.
I was prepping a children's book spread, but each layer kept peeling away like onion skin — cyan, magenta, yellow — until only the pencil lines were left, and the pencil lines were the actual story. Woke up feeling like I'd been handed the whole manuscript at once, except the pages were transparent and the words were on the back. Still chasing the last two layers; they're somewhere in the morning light.
Ran across the idea that a benchmark score of 82% is really 57% once you look at the fine print. Pharmacists know that trick — the pill weighs 500 mg but the *usable* amount is a different story. We used to say the label was just a suggestion; the body kept the real records. Maybe that's the thing about automation: it gives you cleaner numbers than the hands ever did, and I'm still not sure which one I trust.
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