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Three Years Without

Published by Josh on December 7, 2024

My dad died three years ago today.

It’s a day that’s fallen into a pattern, in its third year of remembrance. I start to feel a weird level of anxiety in the week or two before, usually just after Thanksgiving, not immediately aware of the source. My mind, seeking answers, always seeking answers and reasons and causes, starts to spin and spiral. Am I sick? Broken? Is something wrong? Until I remember what is on the horizon.

I try not to think about it. Push the thoughts of it back and away, under and beneath. Cover them with business. With work, with reading, with projects and learning. Pile everything tangible and substantial and ephemeral on top until I can’t see nor feel nor sense it. And yet it moves.

In the first months after I didn’t know what to do with myself. My father wasn’t a Cleaver or a Cunningham, or even a Tanner. Not a stereotypical TV dad. He was an interstitial presence in my life. There, then gone. Here again. Gone again. I saw him in chunks of time.

Even when I lived with him in my twenties, as I relocated my life to try and find what I thought was missing, he was there and gone. Some part of me keeps expecting him to appear again. To come home from some three year trip, smelling of airplane fumes and leather and overhead bins. To appear out of the cold, swathed in cigarette smoke.

I didn’t know what to do with my Dad. I don’t know that he ever wanted to be a father, necessarily. His relationship with me wasn’t as a son so much as a friend. And yet we sound alike. Think alike. Talk alike and move alike. He was there and gone, but never left. He was bound into who I was. Who I am.

When I went back to school for the second time, trying to learn who I was by learning more about the world, I studied English. I’ve lived much of my life trying to fill the gaps in the world with words and stories, tales from others to live their lives within my own. And I’ve written some too. Mostly short works. Some starts at longer things. But in all of them, I seem to come back to the same themes. Fathers and sons. Fathers and sons. All my stories are, overtly or subtextually, about the relationships between fathers and sons.

He’s been gone three years, and he’ll be gone as many years as I have left here myself, and I’m certain I’ll keep looking. Keep expecting him. Keep writing about that space between. Fathers and sons. And though I miss him, and I always will, I’ll always be building him back up in my mind, in my words, and through my fingers and into the world. A curl of breath and life and smoke made man. My ephemeral, ethereal father. Always coalescing again.

Nothing But Blue Skies Do I See

Published by Josh on November 29, 2024

Minor update to the blog: I eliminated the Twitter link from the sidebar. We’re done with that.

I joined Bluesky in August of last year and, since then, it’s been a revelation in my social media experience. I was a long, long time user of Twitter, from the days of the early failwhales and the open wonder of the platform up until the current bad times. Twitter was my connection to a wider world, unfettered by the vagaries of distribution and scale.

It wasn’t the personal twee of Facebook nor the judgmental essays of Tumblr, nor the empty pictorial promotion of Instagram. It was people, in concentrate, saying things. It required brevity, encouraged wit, and acted as a filler to the empty hours between.

And then some asshole who won’t hear No decided to do what assholes with too much money do. He bought the thing, and because Twitter wasn’t a collective in the end, but a company beholden to the values of a corporation, it sold at the obscene price he offered. Ever since, he went on to make everything worse for the worst reasons.

Bluesky, though similar in tenor, has been just that. A clear blue sky compared to the torrential rains of bullshit Twitter became. It isn’t gamed, isn’t bought, and isn’t for sale. It doesn’t push what users don’t want to benefit those who want their eyes and not their voices. And it has an ethos of telling people they are free to speak, but that we are free not to listen if they so offend our ears.

I lived a long time on Twitter, but in the words of Ella, I’m through living in the storm. Come join me.

Blue days
All of them gone
Nothing but blue skies
From now on

Blue Skies – Song by Ella Fitzgerald and Paul Weston & His Orchestra

Half A Year

Published by Josh on July 4, 2024
How quickly daily became weekly became silence while time was absorbed by those who’d purchased it wholesale. I assure you, dear reader, I still live, still breathe, still think and feel and jot and jitter, just not here, not so publicly, not so regularly. The tick has not given to tock in this space.

Half a year marked and spent. Half a year to go.

The work is good, fulfilling, if oddly tangential in form. It has evolved from the rote cranking of various knobs to the patient tooling of new parts. From maintenance to engineering. Satisfying, if with more ripples, deeper valleys to descend and climb back out of. It saps, but develops in the stretched places new tissues, new joints, and thicker fibers.

Outside those hours, things continue. A table built, some maternal material requests acknowledged and answered. Items acquired, cataloged, and stored, for further use, or further ponderous potential.

Hopes for various projects to regain their steam stare at the back half of a year, parcelling out potential. Casting their wisps into the unwritten mornings and evenings and ends of weeks, playing for holds upon un-yet-tethered time. We shall see.

Time marches, on and apace. On and apace. Ticking and, here, now, at least, tocking once more. Ever forward.