Plugs and dottles

Saturday 2/21/26

Multiple nightmares about my ex-wife Molly last night. It's like the trauma--which is actual trauma, because who has that done to them?--is a fixture of me. Tattooed where it counts the most. What makes the waking idea of her harder for me is that there was a time when she showed me kindness, and I bought into that, or the appearance of it, entirely. I became at the mercy of other things later. I'm more prone to romanticize this now, because it's been so long and it's just me. In everything.

No one can be entirely alone, and yet I am. I'm much changed myself, and I'll think whether things would have been different if I became the person I am now much earlier. But I also know you must have something very bad within you to do what she did. That cold, calculating, and cowardly.

The corollary is that I also think about what a day like today might have looked like if that was the case. She was smart and smart people aren't much out there. I realize how much I did love her, which isn't a good feeling now. And I thought she was the most beautiful person ever, and you wish you didn't think that after, you know? The nightmares themselves are vicious and draining. Thirteen years later and I still have them. Maybe I wouldn't if everything else wasn't as bad as it is and getting worse. I have documented this here but I see no reason to dwell on it further here before three thirty in the morning on this Saturday.

There's snow today. The Old Manse in Concord was closed yesterday because of the "storm." I don't know if storm it was (a reference to a little something of mine I've been working on). Nor do I know if the Monument will be closed. There's some ridiculous snowboarding event at City Hall this weekend, sponsored by an energy drink, which is itself a ridiculous thing.

You know much about a person I feel if they are someone who consumes energy drinks. All of the details of life give us information. Or potential information. Or degrees of information. Suggestions thereof. Possible bits of information. They pack the stairs I run with snow and people snowboard down them. Which obviously rules out those stairs. I may get creative stair-wise today. Perhaps down in the subway station at Haymarket. I also need to make a make a fruit and vegetable stand run over there, too. I burn through peppers at a high rate.

I'll always watch a video of a squirrel eating a walnut.

I think I'd enjoy being an owl. If you were going to be an animal, that'd be a good one to be.

My mother had a check-up with her doctor the other day and all went well. With the spring, she'll be able to go down to the lake and walk, which she really needs to do.

I feel like people now are just holding on, waiting for spring. I don't think that used to be the case. Or not to the same degree. Winter was more a matter of course, than like this hardship the way it treated and spoken about now.

The other day there was a box from Mike's Pastry downstairs that had been delivered. It's like three blocks away. I don't get that.

My nephew's basketball team has lost ten games in a row and it has gotten him down. He has three games this weekend so hopefully they can get some wins. I was never on a team that lost many games in a row, but was on teams that got crushed in a single game by a team that was vastly superior. My dad never thought these thrashings were a bad thing. You ate your humble pie. It gave you perspective.

I was pretty surprised that Canada had it as hard as they did yesterday with Finland, which isn't to take anything away from the Fins, because they have a good team and they fight like the dickens. Canadian best-on-best hockey teams are the best there is at rallying. Generation in, generation out. They pull it out when it looks like they're done. This happened in 1972, 1987, could be happening in this tournament. The US has a real shot tomorrow morning, though.

Cale Makar wearing an "A" for that Canada team tells me a lot.

I'm in a liminal stair phase. I don't think I'm going to start with the 1000 stairs-in-a-year-in-the-Monument thing officially until the snow closures have ceased. But we'll see. Right now the key is to just be running stairs.

Watson tells us how Holmes smokes a breakfast pipe containing the plugs and dottles left over from the day before. I do a version of this with my morning coffee. There will be what remains of a bag of Dunkin' Midnight, some Starbucks Christmas coffee from a year ago, and Trader Joe's winter cinnamon blend. It's all the same to me. I just want it black and strong. I think I'd probably like the coffee on an eighteenth century sailing ship. Obviously I'd need to avoid the rum.

Amelia had a school performance the other night. She hadn't been feeling well but she made it through. I had texted my sister this:

Big performance tonight! Say good luck for me! Also: the LGG says knock 'em dead, which obviously has special meaning for her.

Ah, the Little Ghost Girl. Great character.

I'll often have the Music Machine's "Come On In" in my head.

At some point nearly each day I sing the Grateful Dead's "And We Bid You Goodnight" aloud. I do the extemporizing, too. "Walkin' in Jerusalem just like John (goodnight, goodnight)/I remember right well I remember right well (goodnight, goodnight)/A for the Ark she's a wonderful boat..."

Good head work on fiction yesterday.

Good title work for nonfiction this morning.

The characters will tell you their story if they are real. They have to be. Or else they shouldn't be. I don't mean you the reader. I mean you the writer. Really I just mean me.