Listening in the Past Tense

Listening from a distance, listening from some far away place and time. You never thought you would be here now, that so much time would ever pass, but it has; it was some other you who felt so much about those old songs. 

Surface Tension

High summer. The neighbor kids' bubbles sail past my door. July in the Midwest. Surface tension between the real and unreal.

There's a running joke that this place is a glitch in the matrix, which is not so much funny as true. It doesn't trouble me; I always did love the Twilight Zone. Sometimes when I go walking, I feel like I'm passing in and out of a half-remembered dream, or at least it seems like a dream, though sometimes it feels like some other life.

Almost anyone would tell you this town is nowhere and nothing ever happens, even though it's clearly somewhere, and something is always happening. People live, they work and study and thrive and struggle, find health and happiness and heartbreak and decline, like any other place on earth, and yet there is the strangest sense among the general population that it doesn't really count, doesn't amount to much, real life happens somewhere else. It's all swallowed up somehow, by the gravity of this place.

Yet the life force inhabits everything here, the radio gods are on point, mystery rolls over the landscape like bright clouds above the cornfields. 

I keep my eyes on the sky, map out my routes, try not to sink into the soft ground. I remind myself that I still count - we all count - even if I feel unreal. That the light inside of me is the same as the light outside of me, as it is for you, too, and we are all, at our center, as luminous as a soap bubble on a breezy summer day. 

Non-Directional Beacon/The Heart is an Empty Room

"Radio direction finding differs from radar in that only the direction is determined by any one receiver; a radar system usually also gives a distance to the object of interest, as well as direction. By triangulation, the location of a radio source can be determined by measuring its direction from two or more locations."

So sayeth Wikipedia. But I am still searching.

source

But all that happens is...

 

Resolution in suspense.

The Humming of Time

May 25, 2026. About 4:30 in the afternoon. Contemplating the damages. Examining loose ends. 

Así soy mas fеliz

It's just a line from a song in my head. It seems like I can only think in music these days.

This way I am happier

Hauntological Feel

 

Here we are again, at the start of the end. Pondering the lost future. Wondering what takes its place instead.

The Color of the Fire

Ghosts arrive from the past and appear in the present, or so they say, though I sometimes wonder. Sometimes I think that all of time must already exist right here, though we might only see glimpses when the conditions are right. Sometimes I think maybe we are all watching from the future, and the past is only filling itself in. We feel it in our bones and then later we say, "I knew it all along." 

There are certain times of the year when I catch sight of shadowy shapes gliding by my windows, but when I look there is nothing, only a crackle of static or humming in the air. Not leaf-light or flitting birds, but something both more and less substantial. I wonder about the source of these apparitions, whether it's the past or the future leaking through. 

I think about what imprint we make on the world around us, the color of the fire that emblazons our presence in this world, or the spark of life that exists outside time. 

There is no way for me to know yet, but for now, I can speculate. 

 

From the Kitchen Window

 It's been hard to communicate lately, so I keep to myself and scrawl things in my little book. 

Visitants

 That which is not seen. 

The Inscrutable Sky

All astrologers would appear to agree - the conjunction of Neptune and Saturn means something, though exactly what is in dispute. Perhaps it means clarity, breaking free from illusion. Perhaps it means war, or maybe peace. Perhaps it's rebuilding from the ashes or finally learning a lesson once and for all. Only time can tell. 

All I know is at that moment, I was standing in the hallway, lost in the diffuse sunlight from of glass-block window at the edge of my vision, and felt a shift out there, somewhere. Beyond. 

Ephemera

The story so far. 

Presence Out of Context/Underworld

Message, January 21, 2026. 7:21 PM.

Question: If you were dreaming right now, do you think you would sense the presence of the you who was dreaming? The presence of your sleeping self?

If you could, do you think you would recognize yourself as that presence?

I ask because this evening, I was out in town. The sun was below the horizon, but the sky was still a luminous (if ominous) grey. The lights of the town suddenly seemed to become more distinct, more vivid, with a strange depth. Despite the people and the traffic and the shops all around, I could feel the miles of snowy landscape around me, like a sort of echo.

It all felt slightly unreal. Memories flitted through my head not quite at random - us standing outside the art museum in the November wind, you and me on that drive from Texas to the Midwest. Other, things, too. It all felt similar somehow.

It wasn't just cold grue, but layers of it, like layers of time.

The radio played "wrapped around your finger" and it all felt so haunted that I began to question it, the meaning of it. It was as if I were hearing the song in its proper setting for the first time, the proper context, which allowed me to detect an essence I'd never noticed before. Something liminal. What was it I sensed?

My stream of consciousness was like so:

Underworld landscape. What would it feel like if you were dead and didn't know it? Would it feel like this? No, not quite. We are not entirely ghosts. We are something else. Has the rest the world disappeared, has the real world been obliterated and left this shadowy world behind? No, not quite that, either.

And what was the eerie, nameless presence in the atmosphere?

When running through all the iterations of what this was like, I realized that it was most like a dream, but as seen from the other side.

As if I were in the dream without knowing that I was being dreamed.

Except for the nameless, eerie presence of something unknown. 

***

It's been a few days since this happened, and I'm still thinking about it. Would you recognize your own presence out of context? The remnants of your own energy in a place where you used to live? 

Or (as my husband pointed out) the presence of your higher self, the eternal self that already knows all? 

I told him, if that were the case, I could think of two times such an awareness could become evident: if your higher self intervened to nudge you in a necessary direction, or that you, in your physical existence, had become so nebulous that you began to blend into that other world. 

I still wonder which one I experienced. 

But I suspect I know. 

Crystalline Winter

The sky is Uranian blue. 

Solstice

It was a good holiday - calm, pleasant, the best I can remember in a long, long time. There is nothing especially profound or exciting to report except the above, which is enough, I think. 

Belt of Venus/Gemini Moon

The view from my back porch on a frosty evening. 

The earth's shadow seems so much closer here. 

The Cold Grue

I'd first read the term cold grue in the story Thrawn Janet by Robert Louis Stevenson. It was an arcane term to me, but I knew what it meant the moment I read it. I'd known that feeling since I was a child. It usually arrived in November, when it arrived at all, and lay mostly under the surface of winter, waiting to loom up at certain vulnerable moments - something that seemed almost sentient, a grey existential chill that was not merely cold, but deathly.

The appearance of the cold grue was something I'd come to dread. A rising uneasiness, the sense of something minatory, searching along the ground with the wind. I'd felt it a few notable times in my childhood - the visit to Liberty Hill, a playful seance gone awry that my cousins and I held on Thanksgiving, 1980, and the time surrounding the violent death of my aunt not too long afterward. Every holiday season since has been an exercise in keeping it at bay. 

Having spent my much of my life in Texas, it was something I'd associated with my home state, something that lived in the winter landscape there, so I did not expect to find it the first time I visited northwest Ohio in 2022. But on the second-to-last day of my trip, there it was, drifting toward me in waves as I stood on the steps at the art museum, as ominous and melancholy and as pure in form as I'd ever felt it. 

 

I'd never expected my path in life to lead me to the Midwest, and certainly not to such an unadulterated version of the feeling I'd been hiding from. Perhaps it was just my mood that day, I'd thought. Maybe it was just that I was standing in a sculpture garden. As I'd written in one of those links above, the surreal nature of modern art always did leave me a bit uneasy. Or perhaps it was just a temporary, momentary effect of the weather. 

When I did move here in 2023, it was summer, and there were only the aquarium blue sky and cornfields and the sound of daylight crickets in evidence. The cold grue was far from my mind. I would walk through the swamp preserve in the afternoon, or the marshy edgelands next to the mall, studying wildflowers and cottonwood trees. We visited Lake Erie. Then autumn arrived. 

The grue did not come right away. Gradually, though quicker than I would have imagined, the landscape changed its character. There is no real autumn where I'm from, so to watch it take on color and atmosphere was fascinating. Did you know that leaves will simply fall off of trees, without being blown down by wind after drying up from drought? I didn't, so just to watch them was like standing in fairyland. I was very lonely at the time, but it was beautiful even so. I spent so many evenings out there, learning about my newly adopted home, trying to take my mind off the rest of my life, which had quickly commenced unravelling. I learned about being cold, putting on more and more sweaters every time I went out. The skies became greyer and heavier, the chill wind fluttering the remaining cottonwood leaves. 

Near the center of the swamp preserve is a forest of skinny black ash trees. In summer, they were green, humming with insects, but no sooner had November come the skinny forest had transformed into a leafless, slightly hallucinatory labyrinth. The effect being a bit like a hall of mirrors, if only to reflect the inner self. I always felt uneasy when passing by, but as the fall closed in and the temperature fell, I found myself drawn to the place. There was something familiar down among the ashes, something ominous and melancholy and cold. I was so lonely, so heavy-hearted. The reason I'd moved here had fallen apart. I was unwelcome and unwanted, my future in serious doubt. The cold grue beckoned with frigid fingers down this forlorn path. It came over me with such intensity that day that I realized I was in the center of it, as if it had all come down to this singular point in time. I sat down and spoke to it. 

"What are you?' I said.

"The process of dying" it replied.

"Why are you here?"

"It's the earth's dying season"

"Why have I felt you in so many circumstances, then?"

"Because all deaths are the same to the dead." 

My phone rang. I gathered my things and stood up to walk home, wondering if was still existing in my world at all. 

I've moved on since that day, slowly piecing my life back together, trying to find any remnants of my lost inner light. The cold grue remains, in the autumn wind, in the snow, in the garden that has gone to seed. I'm not so troubled by it anymore, even if I am still haunted. I live in a place with all four seasons now, and have a lot still to learn about spring. 

The Wind Carries the Witches

Blowing the last few leaves from the skeletal trees. 

[Title courtesy of Christian Bauman]

All Hallows' Eve

My inexpertly carved cheerful ghost jack-o-lantern welcomes you to the all-night cosmic workshop and groovy divination chamber. 

The October Country

Words are difficult right now, but even in all the silence, it's like walking through a Ray Bradbury book.