A Work Progressing

What happens when a culture no longer has the freedom to have fads? That might seem like a bold statement. Who took that freedom away? More importantly, why would anyone take that particular thing away? Is it possible the answer is an algorithm?

And what is the evidence that fads are no longer allowed? I suppose I’m basing that on the absence of news stories about a ‘fad sweeping the nation.’ That particular slug line lived in newspapers for decades. I don’t recall seeing it in recent years.

What happens when a culture partially institutionalizes a fad? It interrupts the natural life cycle. Institutionalized fads are no longer fads. They are infrastructure.

A culture without dissolving fads doesn’t lose its silliness—it loses its ability to forget together.

By losing that headline, we haven’t found eternal trendiness—we’ve lost our exit strategy.

Today I left the house without my jacket.

In the Midwest, a blizzard is swallowing highways. In California, someone is ordering a Blizzard to cool off.

We move through weather whether we’re prepared or not — wind, heat, stillness, the sudden cold that makes you reconsider your own judgment. I once thought about buying all the technology to become a “weather person.” There are thousands of them now, broadcasting from garages and spare bedrooms. It’s the new CB radio club, only with better antennas.

These days, I measure the seasons by simpler things.

Whether I take my jacket, or whether I leave the door ajar at night.

Out here, the city noise barely reaches me. Traffic dissolves into the distance. What remains is nature, and nature does not whisper. The coyotes conduct the darkness, tracing ridgelines, calling across creek beds. It sounds melodic until you realize it’s a map — and a hunt.

I woke from a dream just now.

Not chased, not threatened.

Just listening.

A soft cry, a shuddering moan — like a puppy punished for barking but unable to silence itself. The sound was so faint it felt like only the creature itself could hear it.

But it wasn’t a puppy.

And not yet food.

It was hiding under my deck, only yards from my open door. Yards from where I slept in the recliner. In the dream, I heard it clearly. And now, the sound thinned, retreated, became harder to understand.

And that’s the season too —

the way the world speaks plainly in dreams, but awake it becomes almost too soft to hear.

A few months back, I wrote a one-act about a chair. I was partly inspired by Sarah Bernhardt, but mostly by the imagined possibility that common objects might carry some faint aspect of sentience. It was important that the chair was not “humanized,” like the objects in Beauty and the Beast. Not in appearance, and not in thought. The chair remains a chair.

It does not move or speak, but it does feel, and it waits.

I placed it in a room with “someone.” I did not identify the someone as human, man, or woman, although the probability is high. The someone sits, moves the chair, moves around the room, comes and goes. The room is one of many, something like a small studio apartment with a hallway entrance and a window to a shared courtyard.

I set up a storyline of two or three days of action from the chair’s perspective. It was an entertaining project. Later, I added a few more characters to the script and began to consider the logical consequences.

I imagined a fire in the apartment below. A small electrical fire that grows by finding combustible material. Even the fire has some quality of sentience. It seeks food, grows in order to seek more food. It keeps growing until it begins to starve, and then it dies out. It prepares its combustible food by heating it first, leaving ash behind. It takes in non-combustible material as well, material that is then altered by heat, sometimes in dramatic ways.

The chair in the room senses the change in temperature as the floor begins to warm.

The someone does not at first. But soon the someone smells something odd.

The someone bolts out of the chair and leaves the room, stepping into the hallway.

The chair does not.

The chair waits.

It waits either for the someone to return and move it… or for the fire to consume it.

The point of the story is that we share existence in this world, in this universe. We may occupy different positions. We may even share some ideas. But we operate within our own agencies.

The chair will always allow someone to sit.

Someone might carry the chair to safety.

Or not.

From this I looked at the current state of AI development. It’s currently in chaos, like the room with the chair. There are characters with their own agencies, and characters that are completely controlled by “someone.” It is also completely unsafe.

I have just read an article about caterpillars and butterflies. Naturally the cocoon is an important feature where metamorphosis takes place. The aspect that struck me anew is that the caterpillar does not grow wings, or legs, or a new paint job. The caterpillar dissolves into a cellular soup and reforms into the butterfly.

The cocoon is the perfect place for this to happen. It is not a sealed environment, but it is safe and protected.

I thought perhaps that most of the arguments about AI concern “the soup,” and that AI will metamorphose into something brand new, and currently unknown.

Like the first butterfly.

I’ve been having this feeling more and more. Maybe it’s age, or simply the accumulation of years. There are things I once knew without thinking that now sit like dust bunnies under the couch.

“Yeah… that seems familiar.”

This isn’t about dementia. What struck me instead was the root of the word familiar—and how even that word has been bent into new shapes.

There was a time when the boundary felt clearer: when something was “family,” and when it wasn’t. Of course, that clarity carried its own distortions—rigid obligations, unspoken tensions, fractures softened by memory.

You could have friends, and they mattered. They were mostly chosen. And then there was family, mostly unchosen—and not always meaningful.

Still, there were families where a kind of continuity held.

A grandchild knew a grandmother.

That grandmother knew her grandmother.

And she had known hers.

Not just known them, but honored them. Kept them close. Felt them. Everything about them was familiar.

Was that common? Probably not. But perhaps it was more common than it is now.

Some of the change wasn’t intentional. People began having children later. Grandparents were gone before a child could know them. And once transportation made distance easy, families scattered. In the United States especially, moving far away became normal.

In many lives, the disruptions were so great that entirely new “families” formed—around religion, sports, identity, hobbies, or even chance. These chosen kinships can be deep, sometimes sturdier than blood, though they lack the inherited familiarity of old.

So what does family mean today?

Is it still familiar?

Or have we traded one kind of closeness for another—quietly weaving our own bonds in a world that no longer holds still.

I’ve been making keychains.

Not because anyone asked. These are unbidden keychains, capable of gaining a key, capable of organizing many keys. But no one has asked me for them. So, naturally, I plan to give them away.

I didn’t exactly decide to make them either. I was making a parka for my wife and wanted to add a waist drawstring, so I ordered a roll of black paracord from Amazon.

When it arrived, I’d ordered wrong—too thin, even doubled. So I ordered more, in colors. I braided four microcords into three bundles, then flat-braided those into a single drawstring. Colorful. Successful. And now I had excess cord and restless hands.

I braided more. I liked that they were quiet fidgets—easy to roll, twist, knot, and unknot. So I ordered more colors, despite having only two hands and no evidence that anyone else wanted a corded fidget.

Then it occurred to me: a short, colorful flat braid would make a good keychain. I wove the remaining microcord into different braids. Another order—this time carabiners—and the keychains were finished.

What is a key?

A key implies a lock. A lock implies something worth protecting—or something worth hiding. A locked house might shelter treasure. Or prisoners. Or nothing at all.

You can lock others in: jail, prison, cage.

Or you can lock yourself in.

Build the cell. Close the door. Throw away the key. Call it safety. Call it principle. Call it whatever you refuse to question.

A friend of mine sold everything—car, house, belongings—to enter ministry overseas. At the airport, the metal detector went off. The agent asked if he had any keys.

My friend froze, briefly. He had none. Nothing to secure. No locks. No obligations clinking in his pocket.

It only took a second. He reached in, pulled out loose change, set it in the tray, and walked through.

Now I’m making keychains for mythical keys. Perhaps there will be no keys at all. Just color and braid. Just readiness, waiting in someone’s pocket.

The carabiner would still set off the detector. The agent might ask: why carry a keychain with no keys?

Most of us already carry keys. We’ve organized them somehow. Offering a new keychain means asking someone to reorganize—to exchange what works for what might work better. Or differently. Or not at all.

I can’t explain why anyone would do that.

The world convulses as it moves through the cosmos—spinning on its axis, tilted in its orbit, bound to a solar system in a galaxy near the edge.

Even with all that motion, the skin of our planet shivers. Plates press and slip. Canyons open. Mountains rise and erode. Life adapts or disappears. Within this thin skin—the biosphere—experimentation never stops.

One life-form, in particular, begins to experiment with a new idea: the idea of a border. A frame.

What falls inside the frame can be named, known, and owned. What lies outside is ignored—or feared—until patience, hunger, or skill pulls it inward. The frame expands. The border shifts.

Over centuries, the inventor of this idea—humankind—comes to see the world almost entirely through it. And what passes through the frame, over time, is recorded as history.

Some of the earliest names we recover are not witnesses, but claimants.

Sargon is one of them. We know him as Sargon the Great. He entered Sumer with the idea of an existing border, took it as his own, and expanded it. He mastered the method of recording.

His daughter, Enheduanna—high priestess and poet—did something different. She spoke from within the frame, not to extend it, but to remain. She wrote hymns. She wrote herself into permanence. A voice carried forward, not a boundary.

Elsewhere, people watched the waves, read the stars, and set out in boats made for deep water. Others followed herds across grasslands until grass gave way to dust, and still they went on. Rivers froze and became bridges. Later, bridges were built where rivers never froze. The frame moved with the wagon and the wheel.

Borders traveled with migration. Abram. Moses. Germanic tribes pressing south. Some carried their borders with them. Some fled borders altogether, searching for land that had not yet been named.

Then came a Macedonian, also called the Great. Alexander knew borders. He did not know the extent of his neighbors’. His aim was simple: cross what lay ahead and see what followed.

He was not defeated by an enemy, but by time—and by his men, who demanded to return home. Alexander turned back knowing this: he had seen a river, a plain, a mountain ridge—and beyond each, another edge. The border could expand farther. Just not for him.

And so it goes, for thousands of years. Some cultures abandon the pursuit of the edge. Some turn inward, asking harder questions: How should we live? Who decides? What endures?

Inwardness is not retreat. It is strain. It demands memory, restraint, and agreement among people who will never fully agree.

Greece tested the instability of voice. Rome tried to bind memory into law. China grounded authority in heaven rather than consent. Each was an experiment. Most collapsed from internal pressure long before external force arrived.

Internal strain breaks cultures before invasion does. They thin. They fail to transmit. The frame closes over them.

Eventually, an experiment born on the North American continent—free speech, independence, self-determination—faces its own reckoning. The inward arguments intensify. The outward pressures continue.

The border—the frame—grows thinner. We can see through it now. The edges themselves become visible.

When frames no longer hold, something else must carry.

Not a claim.

Not a record.

A song.

 

A Pocket Lint Post

 

This has been in a folder for over twenty years. Not hidden. Not lost. Just… waiting.

 

Nine hundred letters, give or take. Some readable. Some so faint they look like breath on glass. Pencil, ink, chain-laid paper, Washington stamps, Utah dust. These are not “documents.” They are pressure marks from two people separated by distance and time who refused to go silent. This is not an archive piece. This is lint.

 

Who They Were

Charles Truesdell was a civil engineer working the rail lines west—Echo City, Weber Canyon, Salt Lake, Rochester, Syracuse. His life was measured in grades, bridges, trestles, and time delays.

 Mary Fessenden stayed east—New Hampshire, Washington, Warren, York Beach. She lived among farms, family, books, tents under butternut trees, and long evenings of restraint. They didn’t meet in comfort. They met in uncertainty.

 

 

The Waiting Problem

These letters are not romantic in the soft way. They are romantic in the risky way—where nothing is guaranteed, and everything costs something. The mail itself was unreliable. Snow stopped trains. Delays stretched weeks. But the deeper waiting was heavier: Waiting for:

   •   permission

   •   certainty

   •   financial footing

   •   moral clarity

   •   a “settled plan of life”

 

They didn’t rush toward the center. They circled the edge.

 

From Charles, Early

He writes first with confidence, then doubt, then restraint:

“Your letters are usually so cold that when you do thaw out & let slip a sweet word the effect is something like that of a sunbeam in winter weather… It is not the words but their source which makes them sweet to me.”

Already you can hear the imbalance: Distance on one side. Control on the other. Affection negotiating the crossing.

 

From Mary, Holding the Line

She responds with something sharper than romance—judgment with compassion:

“Imagine your sister in my place… a woman who has known a man only months in a strange city, of whom she knows literally nothing except that she loves him.”

She doesn’t collapse into feeling. She measures it.

Later she says:

“Let us go on therefore writing as friends… and when you have some settled life or home… come to me.”

Love, but not blindly. Risk, but not recklessly.

The Tent Under the Butternut Tree

At one point Mary describes living alone in a tent on a hillside farm:

“My room is a tent pitched under a butternut tree… At night the country stretches before me for miles… I have a very comfortable armchair in which I often imagine you sitting, smoking your pipe and enjoying it with me.”

This is not novelty. This is presence-in-absence—one of the hardest things to sustain honestly.

 

Charles, Wanting More Than He Should

He oscillates between humility and hunger:

“If I could only know your heart as you know it… If you would only trust me, Mary, as I trust you.”

And then, the confession of vulnerability:

“I am no more to you now than a spirit which I am fated to love and can only hope will love me in return.”

That line carries weight. It’s not pleading. It’s exposure.

 

The Physical Evidence

These letters are not clean. They are:

   •   Chain-laid paper with faint blue lines

   •   Philip & Solomon’s imprint from Washington, D.C.

   •   Pencil so light it’s nearly air

   •   Envelopes folded without envelopes

   •   Postmarks from Newburgh, Concord, Warren, Washington

   •   Washington 3-cent stamps

   •   Iron Mills paper

   •   Ink that darkened as resolve did

Some letters arrived weeks late. Some were burned at request. Some were never meant to survive. But they did.

 

The Long Delay

They wait. They hesitate. They restrain. They almost lose each other by doing things carefully instead of boldly. And then—after years of distance—Mary writes:

“I have had to set the hour for our wedding so have said quarter to twelve… Take me when and where you please Chas… This is the last time I shall sign myself—

Yours forever.”

No rhetoric. No drama. Just decision.

 

What This Isn’t

This isn’t:

   •   nostalgia

   •   sentimentality

   •   costume romance

   •   moral theater

This is two people moving slowly because cost was real. Marriage meant:

   •   leaving family

   •   moving across states

   •   economic instability

   •   moral responsibility

   •   social consequence

They didn’t drift into union. They walked into it under load.

 

Why This Belongs in Pocket Lint

Because this isn’t history as monument. It’s history as residue. This is what survives:

   •   hesitation

   •   judgment

   •   hunger

   •   obedience

   •   doubt

   •   restraint

   •   endurance

Not the grand narrative.MThe lint caught in the fold.

Final Line (and it’s true)

I don’t know whether this becomes a book. I don’t know whether it becomes an archive edition. I don’t know whether it becomes anything more than this. But I do know this: It’s too good to leave in data storage. So here it is— out in the open, still breathing.

 

 

(From an early post)

I’ve never had patience for ghosts—the TV kind, the séance kind, the cold-spot theatrics. My upbringing doesn’t lean that way, and my mind prefers a world with hinges. Still, the most accurate way to describe my childhood home is the sentence I’ve spent a lifetime trying not to use:

I grew up in a haunted house.

We arrived when I was five. A post-war box on two lots, built board by board by a man named Stotts. The house was modest—two bedrooms, one bath—but to a child who’d lived under upstairs neighbors, it felt like a cathedral with grass. A laundry room with an interior window opening into the dining room only made it stranger, as if two sets of plans had been shuffled together without comment.

A month after moving in, Stotts returned. I remember him clearly, in the way memory sharpens certain figures unfairly: the fedora, the tired good manners, the slight lean forward as if the world had pushed him one step beyond balance. He offered to buy the house back—said he’d pay extra. My mother refused; she didn’t trust the universe enough to gamble twice. I watched him walk to his car, open the passenger door, and pull a bottle of whiskey from the glove compartment. He handed it to my father, who drank from it like a man in a black-and-white movie. They shook hands. Stotts drove off.

The next morning his name was in the paper. Suicide. Head wound.

The man who built our house chose not to live anywhere else.

That was the beginning.

Neighbors mentioned a man in a fedora walking our backyard late at night. They said it in the soft voice people use to deliver unwelcome news. My mother rejected the idea, but she stopped sitting down. She occupied the spot in front of the central gas heater, feet planted, back straight. Years later she admitted the reason: from that position she could see every doorway. She spent eleven years in that stance—half sentinel, half prisoner.

My own education in strangeness began when I was eight. One night my father was working the graveyard shift. I woke to find my mother sitting in my brother’s bed, holding his hand. The two of them stared at different windows like they were guarding separate borders. When I asked what they were doing, I was shushed.

What I wasn’t told until years later was this: my brother heard it first. He looked out the window and saw nothing. Then he brought my mother in, and she looked out and saw nothing. Only then did they wake me.

And then the footsteps started again.

Slow, deliberate, unmistakably human. They walked the length of the new concrete path outside my window, paused, and then the gate latch clicked. The gate swung open. The steps continued beneath my brother’s window. Then the gate slammed shut, the bolt dropping into the drilled hole with a sound that hit the frame of the house like a tuning fork.

And then the sequence repeated.

And repeated.

For twenty minutes.

I asked why my father was pacing outside. My mother said, without turning her head, “He’s at work.” My brother added, “Don’t look. If he sees you…” That unfinished warning was worse than anything I could have seen.

Other oddities followed. Once, waiting for a friend, I tried to open the front door and found it immovable. Not locked. Not stuck. Simply refusing. The back door did the same. By the time I reached the rear of the house I was running without knowing why. In the end I climbed out a porch window because it was the only thing that would yield. When I returned moments later, both doors opened as if nothing had happened.

My friend refused to come inside again.

The last incident was my brother’s. We came home from a camping trip to find the kitchen changed. Above the stove the ceiling paint had blistered, heat-warped into small, puckered blisters—though the burners were off. Across the kitchen, on the pull-out cutting board, sat a new loaf of Wonder Bread. The wrapper had been shredded cleanly from top to bottom.

And through the naked loaf, driven straight through from end to end, was our kitchen broom.

There was a halfhearted attempt to blame my brother, but he was nowhere in sight. We threw away the bread, kept the broom, and said very little.

He finally came home hours later. He had arrived earlier, seen the blistered paint and the impaled bread, and left the house at a run. He didn’t bother to close the door behind him.

We moved a year later. None of us minded. Even my father packed quickly.

I still don’t believe in ghosts.

But I believe in memory, and in the things a house can hold long after the person who built it lets go.

(From an earlier post)

Obert showed up over winter break with a new .22 pistol and suggested we go shooting. I had my .22 Ruger and my dad’s 38/.357 he’d bought at the same time. We grabbed ammo, drove as far as the dirt lot allowed, then hiked over a few hills to the bayshore.

We found a small rain pond full of cans and bottles—good targets—and spent an hour shooting everything to pieces. Down to the last rounds and the last bottle, I reloaded fast and decided to practice a quick draw.

My holster wasn’t tied to my leg. When I drew, it twisted, the barrel caught, my thumb slipped, and the gun fired. The bullet went through three layers of leather, into my thigh, hit bone, shattered, and stopped.

I found myself flat in the mud, feet in the pond.

“I’m shot!”

Obert looked over. “No you’re not. I didn’t hear anything.”

We found the holes in the leather. Then the hole in my leg. No exit.

“Get me out of here.”

He first had to go to the bathroom. Then he went to find the access road. I lay in the mud while a German shepherd dripped water on me and its owner said, “Yeah, I used to shoot down here too,” and kept walking.

Almost an hour later, Obert came roaring down the access road—right past me. He reversed, tried to load me into the car, realized the passenger door was locked, unlocked it, turned back, and watched Max the dog jump into the seat again. The owner removed him at his usual glacial pace.

The Drive Out

We lurched onto the access road. The windshield was splattered with clumps of mud but still usable. Then we hit a puddle. More mud. Still fine.

Then Obert turned on the wipers.

One swipe turned the entire windshield into a solid wall of brown. Total blackout.

We rolled the windows down and stuck our heads out like two injured hounds trying to navigate by smell.

At the next intersection, Obert tapped the horn for safety.

The horn button launched off the wheel, smacked him in the face, and vanished all the way into the way-back of the station wagon—a perfect trajectory into the automotive void—leaving the horn jammed in one continuous scream.

Now we were blind, muddy, fishtailing, and blasting a county-wide alarm.

That was my ride to the hospital.

Aftermath

At the ER, Obert disconnected the battery to silence the horn. The doctor came in with X-rays.

“You’ve been shot. Bullet shattered on the bone. A few pieces are in the muscle.”

“What now?”

“Nothing. Maybe someday a piece will work its way out.”

That was the entire treatment plan.

I healed slowly, entered college with a cane, and still check my leg for shrapnel.

And I don’t quick-draw anymore.

Sure, the Andes have their show-off credentials. Super-high mountains. Lake Titicaca—the highest navigable lake in the world, and definitely the best lake for mischievous elementary boys who need a good story later in life.

But the Andes also gave us something stranger and far more delicious: potato–tomato. Same family. Same neighborhood. Two plants domesticated within a long day’s hike of each other, both up in that thin air where people know how to survive and plants learn tricks.

Here’s the part your brain likes:

potatoes and tomatoes are opposites wearing the same jacket.

Potato berries? Boring and yucky—don’t touch. Eat the root. Tomato roots? Nasty—don’t touch. Eat the berries.

Nightshades are like that: one big family reunion where most of the cousins are toxic, dramatic, or both. Out of roughly 3,000 varieties, maybe eight are worth inviting to dinner. The edible ones include eggplant (India), peppers (Mexico/Peru), and the Andean tag-team that changed half the globe’s cooking.

So thank you, Andes.

Without you, Italian food loses its red sauce, Irish food loses its foundation, Slavic and German food lose their comfort staples, and American diners lose their fries, ketchup, salsa, chili, hash browns, and basically their will to live.