Driving Past Horses

I don't have any illusions about this project. I am going to fizzle out, or struggle to find my angle, or trudge on awkwardly. But I have no other medium right now in which to stretch out a few words as I want to; I think it is worth the experiment. I often say that Facebook is little better than a huge community bulletin board for you to post your business for the rest of the world to look over as they go past. I don't know what Twitter is, exactly, besides something clique-y. With every social media platform, you are putting yourself out there and hoping somebody notices. The expectations for how you present yourself vary from platform to platform, but each one has its own informal rules, etiquette, tone—and if you do not conform at least somewhat, it can be difficult to find your niche. It's a craft, and not one I have been able to convince myself fits into my life to learn.  With a blog, the craft of writing feels familiar. It is structured like a diary or journal, or p...

What a beautiful first day of October! I think most days in autumn (true autumn, mind) can't help but be beautiful. I'm preparing for a trip, and there are myriad little reasons why this is stressful, but I keep taking deep breaths and (be honest) getting dopamine hits from my phone and doing one more thing, and right now I'm keeping it together. It should be a slice of heaven, this trip, which is to say delicious but incomplete. I have the sense that I am hunkering down so as not to be lost at sea, something immense and dazzling and staggering before me, of which I must limit my partaking to its edges.  Hurricane Ian swept by, sparing the sites most personally significant to me. It continues its course, swelling and threatening again, elsewhere.  This is life, right now, to me. So many times I have begged God to spare me some personal drama or catastrophe, because "after all I have been through, I don't think I have it in me to deal with this right now." I ar...