A Work Progressing

I used to say that some things just feel natural. You pick up an object and your hands already know how to hold it, as if you’ve been living with it your whole life. It’s rare—most things are foreign to us. Horses, for example, sit firmly on the other end of the spectrum for me. But a needle and thread? That I understood from the start. As early as I can remember.

I don’t mean I was a prodigy, just that I felt some kind of hidden comfort. And if you understand needle and thread, you eventually end up making things. Which means you face the oldest question in sewing:

Do you hold the needle still and move the thread, or hold the thread still and move the needle?

Before I’m done here, I’ll try to answer that.

I don’t have hundreds of thousands of examples of my sewing craft. Not hundreds. Barely dozens. A natural affinity doesn’t guarantee quantity—or quality—just a feeling. A confidence. The sense of I can do this while other people shake their heads.

“Replace a broken crankshaft? Yelp it.”

“New idea for hiking clothes? Let’s go to Joann’s Fabrics.”

One of my early experiments came from backpacking. Why carry shorts for hot days and long pants for cold nights? Why not sew shorts with attachable pant legs?

I explored my options:

• grommets and lacing — too slow, too fiddly, and nowhere to hide the laces

• Velcro — worked until the fabric stretched and it exploded open with a terrible rip

• zippers — specifically the large YKK kind used in sleeping bags and tents

Zippers won.

Material was the next problem. I wasn’t above using a pattern, but I ended up modifying my favorite long pants: soft, slightly worn Levi’s 501s. Not ideal when wet, but rugged, comfortable, and unremarkable—unless someone noticed the zippers.

Later I switched to a light poly/cotton blend that dried quickly and weighed almost nothing. A full decade later I finally saw a commercial version of what I’d sewn. I doubt I had anything to do with that.

I wore the zip-off pants everywhere, even to work. The only embarrassing moment came when a female faculty member painting her office yelled across the quad:

“John! I’m painting. Zip off your pants and help!”

That one echoed for years.

Another sewing episode happened right after I left the military and returned to college. My focus was scattered, and I needed a project. Fall was coming; I wanted a warm shirt-jacket hybrid. I had four or five worn-out 501s that no longer fit. I seam-ripped them into parts.

The legs tapered nicely into sleeves. The back pockets became front pockets. I drafted a shoulder yoke and front/back panels. The collar took some trial and error. The closure took even more. A pullover was either too big once on, or impossible to get on if it fit. I settled on a YKK zipper to the collarbone and used the button fly for the last six inches.

I wore it for months before I overheard someone say:

“Here comes dickhead.”

Now, I’ve been called worse, but that one felt… pointed.

Later on, parenthood brought Halloween for the children. As parents we did not go big on home decor, but we paid attention to costumes. Most store-bought choices were easy—but bad. The better choice was a needle and thread.

The benefit was longevity. Costumes had a generational life: some passed from sister to sister, some made it from mother to daughter. The difference was technical. My early attempts were hand-sewn, with the fabric unraveling over time.

I reluctantly went to machine work on long straight runs, with hand stitching at the crucial corners. Eventually I worked out even the tight corners. I still prefer hand sewing long stitches, then securing everything with machine hems—far better than pins.

I’m not saying I mastered machine work. The extra tricks—buttonholes, decorative stitching—were not for me. I stayed in a narrow lane: stitch length and tension for different fabrics.

After buying two kits for parkas from Frostline, I made both entirely with machine work on an old Singer that worked, but pretty much only went straight. Both parkas were very successful. I left mine somewhere a few years ago, but Sherry had hers until a few weeks ago. Our grandson needed a rain-resistant coat for camping, so Sherry gave him hers.

My next big project was sleeping bags for the family. I had a great bag from Sierra Designs that I’d used for years. It was a modified mummy design that could be opened flat like a quilt. I decided to use that as a model for two bags that could be zipped together.

The pre-planning forced me to gather supplies from several sources. In pre-Amazon days this meant driving some distance and waiting several weeks for UPS deliveries. Finally I had everything.

I didn’t know how long the project would take, so scattering fabric around the house seemed ill-advised. I retreated to the garage, where the pool table was better than the dining room table. I set up the machine on the pool table, fed by a large thread spool on a nearby pole. I pre-wound half a dozen bobbins to speed up assembly.

I’d bought matching yards of ripstop nylon for the shell and the liner: a soft, silky blue for the interior and a tougher black for the exterior. Everything fit the bolt width. The only challenge was sewing the seven-inch-high baffles for the down tubes. I built one bag at a time, learning on the first.

The down came from a custom shop specializing in premium goose down—lightweight, excellent loft. When all was sewn, I stuffed the tubes, but even with careful control, down escaped everywhere. The garage turned into a snow globe. I tried, and failed, to suck it up with a shop vac. Eventually I opened the garage door for several days until the birds redistributed the fluff into their nests.

With the next bags, I set up a large enclosed yard tent, placed the sewing machine and down inside, zipped myself in, and worked inside the contained snow globe. Afterwards, I could vacuum up every feather.

The bags were so successful we still have them forty years later. One has been used every night as a bed comforter. Some tears have been stitched tight, but no seams have ever burst.

A few weeks ago I researched replacing Sherry’s parka. Frostline had been closed for almost twenty years, but complete Frostline kits have popped up on Etsy. For forty-five dollars I bought the exact kit I used for hers. It arrived within a week, and I modified it with an additional wool liner. We’re not backpacking anymore, so weight wasn’t a concern—warmth was. Yesterday I finished the kit with the last hem, using the last of the thread on the bobbin and the spool. It looks good.

Today I went back on Etsy and found my own 1980s parka kit — also for forty-five dollars.

I’m waiting with pins and needles.

Oh yeah- needle still, move the thread.

A Story

There is a room with a chair. It sits 3/4 s on the far wall, next to the table, near the front window. It is well worn, wooden, but not ladder backed. The front legs are curved and end in the feet. One of the back legs has a little wad of paper taped to the bottom. The chair used to tip a bit, but no more.

The room was spare, it had other furniture, but none showed care like the chair. It did not match the table, it was a stranger to the others.

When a person was in the room, the chair was used. Its position allowed someone to see out the window to the courtyard, and to the other windows facing the courtyard.

The chair, and the window were on the third floor of a six floored apartment building. It was perfectly placed to look across, to look down, and to look up. The window pane sometimes vibrated with the noise of outside.

The chair does not see.

But it feels.

 

It has learned the language of weight:

   •   a child is a brief landing

   •   a lover is a settling-in

   •   guilt is a hover

   •   grief is a collapse

   •   fear barely touches the seat

   •   certainty is a full downward surrender

The chair has never spoken, but it has judged more honestly than any mirror.

It knows the difference between:

   •   someone who sits to rest

   •   someone who sits to think

   •   someone who sits to listen

   •   someone who sits because they do not dare to stand

 

It feels direction, too.

Weight shifts north when someone steels themselves.

Weight shifts east when someone hides something.

Weight shifts west when someone waits for an answer that will not come.

Weight shifts south when someone gives up.

 

Some people treat a chair like an object. Others treat it like a confessional. The chair remembers the difference.

 

Someone enters the room.

Not abruptly — but with the kind of pause at the threshold that the chair recognizes.

A pause that has weight.

A pause that decides whether to sit or not.

The chair feels the air shift first.

It always does.

The floorboard gives the faintest complaint beneath the first step.

It’s a careful step — not timid, not tired, but measured.

The step of someone carrying a thought they haven’t decided what to do with.

The someone crosses the room, not looking at the chair,

but walking the perimeter the way people do when they’re making deals with themselves.

They glance toward the window.

The window gives back the courtyard, the other windows, the stacked lives.

But the someone doesn’t look at the view long —

only long enough to confirm what they already knew was there.

Then they turn toward the chair.

The chair can tell immediately:

   •   this is not a visitor

   •   not a person passing through

   •   not someone lost

   •   not someone afraid of the room

This is someone who has been here before but is not sure they belong here now.

The weight that settles into the chair is familiar and changed.

A shift that says they’re holding something in instead of sinking down.

The chair feels the uncertainty in the thighs, the hesitation in the spine, the way one palm rests on the table as if bracing for news that hasn’t arrived yet.

The someone sits —

not fully, not finally,

but enough for the chair to judge:

They have returned to make a decision they don’t yet want to name.

The someone does not settle.

Not yet.

The someone sits, not fully, not finally, but enough for the chair to judge: They have returned to make a decision, they don’t yet want to name.

The someone does not settle.

Not yet.

They sit in the chair the way a person holds a question on their tongue — present, but not spoken. Their gaze drops. A slow, precise glance finds the back leg—the one with the small, taped wad of paper stabilizing the system. The look is not inquisitive, but confirming. The wad is there.

The chair, though perfectly steady, feels the necessity of the check; it feels the weight of remembering what it costs to be stable.

Their back stays an inch from the chair’s full support. The weight is tilted forward, toward possibility, toward interruption. The chair feels the tension running down one thigh, the way the heel doesn’t quite rest on the floor. This is a posture with a direction. 

They sit in the chair the way a person holds a question on their tongue — present, but not spoken. Their back stays an inch from the chair’s full support.

The weight is tilted forward, toward possibility, toward interruption.

The chair feels the tension running down one thigh, the way the heel doesn’t quite rest on the floor. This is a posture with a direction.

 

The someone is not waiting for time to pass. They are waiting for a signal.

 

A faint shift in the hallway’s air. A shadow sliding under the door. A hinge complaining at the far end.

Someone else moving through the building with a purpose that intersects this room. The chair senses the alertness.

It knows this type:

   •   poised

   •   listening

   •   braced

   •   too still to be calm

   •   too quiet to be at peace

 

Then— a sound. Not loud.

Just the familiar syncopation of shoes on the third-floor boards.

Measured steps. Not running, not hesitant. The tempo of a person who has come here before.

The someone closes their eyes for a breath. Their weight shifts slightly back, as if deciding whether to stand before the steps arrive at the door.

The chair absorbs the choice. The footsteps continue Unbroken. Approaching.

 

The someone doesn’t move. Not forward. Not away. Just waits. More tightly than before.

 

The chair feels all of it. The footsteps stop.

Not abruptly — not with that impatient halt that means knocking is next — but with a quiet, deliberate stillness.

 

A stillness long enough to make the someone in the chair tighten their grip on the front edge of the seat.

 

The chair feels the pressure of fingertips pressing meaning into the wood. Seconds pass. Enough to count. Enough to miscount. Enough to wonder if the footsteps were imagined, if the hallway held only echoes, if the building was shifting its old bones again.

The someone in the chair leans forward a fraction of an inch. Not enough to rise. Just enough to surrender to the doubt: Were those steps real?

The pause stretches. The air holds.

 The chair cannot see — but it knows when a person’s weight tilts toward the door. It knows the subtle forward slide of anticipation, the breath held just past comfort.

Then — soft, unmistakable:

 

A pivot. Not a retreating panic-step. Not a misdirection. Just a single, careful turn of the body facing away from the door. A decision not to enter.

The steps begin again, moving down the hall, fading toward a stairwell or another door or nowhere at all.

 

And in the chair, the someone finally exhales. Not relief. Not disappointment. Just the sound of a person who has waited, for something that chose not to arrive.

Someone rises from the chair. Not quickly — but with that kind of slow lift where the weight stays behind a moment, as if the body is negotiating with the room.

The chair remembers their shape, and releases them without complaint.

The someone steps toward the window, close enough for the glass to catch their breath and fog the courtyard into a soft, trembling blur. Outside, the building across the way keeps its usual posture — curtain, shutter, balcony, rail — all the small architectures of other lives.

 

The courtyard: a scatter of passing shadows, a stroller, a dog, a neighbor leaning on a railing, two bicycles left against a wall, an absence where someone should be.

Someone tilts their head, scanning the patterns of arrival and departure, the flicker of figures through other windows, the rise and fall of motion on all six floors. Then, barely above breath — quiet enough that the word falls into the windowpane instead of the room —

“Why?”

Not spoken to the courtyard. Not to the vanished footsteps. Not to the chair. Not even to themselves.

Just released — like a question with no direction, looking for a place to land.

The someone stays at the window a moment longer, watching the courtyard continue its indifferent choreography, coming and going, answerless.

And time shifts. The room remains. The chair remains. The wad of paper remains. The window stays tethered to the courtyard’s small, indifferent pulse. Only the light changes.

Another someone enters — different gait, different tension, carrying a different question. They walk the same perimeter. They pause at the same threshold between settling and fleeing. They place the same hand on the table.

The chair feels the same hesitation in the spine, the same weight held back, the same almost-sitting that becomes sitting. Everything echoes. But the whisper, when it finally comes — soft against the same pane of glass, caught in the same breath that fogs the courtyard— is not “Why?”

It is: “Who?”

The word lands without answer. The room absorbs it. The chair holds it. The courtyard does not respond.

Lights fade.

Blackout.

 

Acronyms

My life may have been shaped, at least in part, by acronyms.

More structured than I thought.

And much more experimental — and philosophical — than anyone intended.

At nine years old I wasn’t taking “math” anymore, at least not the kind anyone recognized. It wasn’t algebra either. It was a workbook: 8.5 x 11 inches, about three-quarters of an inch thick, stamped with four block letters:

SMSG.

It was the “new math.”

The math your parents couldn’t help you with. We students had our own translation: Some Mad Scientist Goofed. The official name was Stanford Mathematics Study Group.

And yes — it was a real West Coast education experiment.

Some said it was a response to Sputnik, the little Russian satellite that passed overhead and mocked us with every orbit. The solution? Better math scores. A smarter generation. And, of course, beating the Russians to the moon. We got to the moon. The math scores did not follow.

What SMSG really taught us was how to work with confusion, how to proceed without support, and how to translate meaning inside chaos. That was the real lesson — not the worksheets.

Ten years later, in college, I had to take English composition to graduate. At my campus, all sections of ENG 120 — all eleven of them — used the same cookbook: TMITM, better known as The Medium Is the Message by Marshall McLuhan.

An experimental composition course about the rising power of media instead of, well, composition. I took the class three times. Dropped the class three times. Got a little farther each attempt. Five years later I finally took a standard English course and passed.

My military life was full of acronyms too. I was 11Bravo — infantry bound. I tried to outrun both infantry and Vietnam by signing up for 32F20, fixed-ciphony repair. Instead, I ended up in frozen Korea.

By 1985, already teaching at the college, I bought my first Macintosh for my graphic design course. That’s when I started using a little program that produced a big acronym:

WYSIWYG.

What you see is what you get. The radical idea was that what you saw on the screen would actually match what came out of the printer. Hard to imagine now, but in those days the printout often had only a passing resemblance to what was on the monitor.

Later came hard drives — and the best computer connection of its era: SCSI — Small Computer System Interface.

That one changed everything. Files lived on the computer instead of in a drawer full of floppies. No more digging, no more recreating. Easily accessed, easily modified, easily saved as templates.

A life shaped by acronyms. And somehow, all of them nudged me toward the edges of systems — where the real experiments happen.

https://a.co/grxACrg

“I want you to be there…” that is the explanation for why a TV evangelist made his commercial, which by the way, also promoted his latest book.

At first it seems perfectly fine, and even kind. ‘Heaven is good, and it’s so good that I want you there.’

Hey, what on earth is wrong with that? Well, it’s very consistent with their daily attempts to get to know me here on earth. And what about all those phone calls to establish that I was someone that you wanted to spend eternity with?

None of that happened. Apparently he is only interested in those people that responded to his call to join him, because, “I want you to be there”…

I don’t want to be a cynic, I just desire for people to be honest and humble with they are witnessing for eternity, and not selling themselves, or their books.

Thanatos, in Greek mythology, is the personification of death—not violence or chaos, just the quiet inevitability of dying. He’s the twin brother of Hypnos (Sleep) and a son of Nyx (Night). Where Ares brings slaughter, Thanatos brings stillness.

It is also the root word for the strategy of “playing dead”. This can be a conscious choice, or it can be instinctively chosen. It’s called “thanatosis”. One of the more famous examples is the Virginia Opossum, who will play dead from several minutes to a few hours.

The list of animals that use thanatosis is not fully known. It is certainly in the thousands, from insects, birds, reptiles, and mammals.

Death is widely known, and even copied.

I fell upon this poem recently, by Tom Hirons. I recommend that you visit his website to read the original.

The narrator is visited, late at night, by a mud-covered, half-divine figure who bursts into the house demanding food and attention. The “wild god” eats, drinks, laughs, and speaks in riddles. He tells stories that unsettle the host, stories about hunger, death, love, and the raw world outside the door. The narrator is both terrified and fascinated.

As dawn comes, the wild god leaves, and the speaker stands changed—shaken, more alive, painfully aware that the polite life he’s built is fragile and temporary. The encounter becomes a parable of hospitality to chaos: what it means to invite the untamed into the human home.

I just finished Dan Brown’s latest book. This isn’t a review — more a moment of noticing.

Mystery novels rely on a kind of agreed-upon lie. Something terrible or hidden sits at the center, and we pretend we don’t see the shape of it yet. That’s the deal. If it weren’t dire and uncertain, we’d be reading a police log.

The rhythm goes like this: hint, setback, clue, twist, and a little parade of “ah-ha” crumbs to keep us moving. And Brown does that well enough — puzzles stacked on puzzles, Prague described in such detail I could practically order lunch there. It’s all quite competent, even enjoyable.

But the whole time, the ending is already printed. We’re not discovering; we’re walking a path that was poured in concrete months ago. The reveal isn’t found, it’s… waiting. That’s the funny thing. Books are fixed. And still we act surprised.

It’s a bit like watching a magician from the wrong angle. See the rabbit under the table once, and the trick never really recovers. Delight evaporates into technique. And technique, once exposed, is more interesting to the magician than the audience.

I noticed myself growing impatient with all the clues. Not because they were bad — but because they felt inevitable. A machinery problem. Too many gears visible.

Oddly, plays and films get away with the same structure. Maybe because they look alive. Pages stare back with a kind of smug certainty: “You’ll get here eventually.” A play at least feels like it could derail, even if it never will. That tension counts for something.

Could a mystery work without resolution? Probably. Would most readers want that? Probably not. We like closure. We like to feel clever, even when the author already solved everything and just hid the pieces for us to find like Easter eggs for adults.

We say we want surprise. Mostly we want the illusion of surprise — safely contained inside a cover.

Pulling the thread a little, I’m realizing this: part of me prefers when a story might escape. When the edges feel like they could tear. Less tidy. More alive. Possibly dangerous.

Which is probably why I keep reading mysteries and then muttering about them afterward.

https://a.co/d/dnK0hcr

I once spent six hours removing 1,247 dust specks from a Kodachrome slide my father shot in 1966. No one asked me to. My mother cried when she saw the print. She didn’t know why. That was enough.

If you’ve ever removed dust by hand, named a file like a prayer, or wondered what “auto” forgets — this book might speak to you. It’s available now in beta form. I welcome echoes.

‘Original Copy” is my response to that question — a book about memory, transmission, and the ethics of touch in the age of AI.It’s not a manual. It’s a meditation. From darkroom trays to Photoshop layers, from family archives to forgotten American boxes, it traces the lineage of copying as ritual, not convenience.

The beta version is live. I don’t know if it will resonate. But if you believe restoration is retrieval — not invention — I invite you to read, reflect, and respond.

If you’ve ever rescued a memory, retouched a moment, or wondered what survives in the margins — this book is for you. 

The difference between curved and flat is not merely optical—it’s metaphysical, mnemonic, and ritualistic.

Flat Mirrors: The Illusion of Truth

• A flat mirror reflects with minimal distortion. It promises fidelity, symmetry, realism.

• In art and theology, it often symbolizes clarity, self-awareness, or divine transparency.

• But this clarity is deceptive—it reflects only what’s directly in front of it, and only from one angle. It’s a controlled truth, a curated self.

In Augustine’s Dilemma, the flat mirror might represent the soul’s desire for unmediated self-knowledge—but also its limitation. The soul sees itself, but only as it appears, not as it is.

Curved Mirrors: The Ritual of Distortion

• A convex mirror, like in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, expands the field. It captures more—room, witnesses, divine echoes—but distorts.

• A concave mirror draws inward, magnifies, inverts. It reveals hidden depths, but warps them.

Curved mirrors are thresholds, not windows. They invite interpretation, not certainty. They reflect not just the subject, but the context, the unseen, the ritual space. The soul may want a flat mirror, but only the curved one lets it see itself move.

In my story “The Tug”, the AI is a curved mirror—reflecting fragments, errors, near-truths. It doesn’t offer clarity; it offers engagement. It keeps you tugging.

Ritual Implications

• Flat mirrors are for grooming, for control, for presentation.

• Curved mirrors are for mystery, for surveillance, for sacred distortion.