Every day, I have always had a deep need for long quiet. It is more challenging to find in a blended family household of four children, and sometimes I feel so pushed and bent, like I am on a ride that is spinning me too quickly. My career, as it is now, is a difficulty, as the daily requirements of what I do and how it is structured relies on a personality and constitution that thrives on stress. I suppose at some point in time, this may have been me. My nervous system has declared otherwise.

There are times when I need to sit in a chair and have deep thinky thinks. I often do not arrive at any set conclusion, but I do know the process is important. Righ tnow I am in an orange chair with a floral foot rest. A cup of strong coffee is beside me and the silver light outside floods the living room and catches all the blues. 

Outside the dahlias push up, the roses struggle as they lately do in our cloudy Junes. I have had breakfast: leftover kimchee rice with a freshly cooked egg. I wonder sometimes that all portions come in these giant containers lately. Anne wrote a post that intersected with many thoughts I have not been able to express. I have read it twenty times at least. Maybve more.

The other day, in Capitol Hill, in the center of the sidwalk, was a brand new Fischer Price Castle. It was in a battered box, dusty and kept in an attic or basement, but brand new. I picked it up and carried it home, set it on the table, and wiped it clean. I explored every inch of it, the yellow drawbridge, the staircase that swings out. This castle is over 50 years old, and we had one we played with. As an object, it stirred up old memories. Going into the co-op grocery, whole wheat bread, good food sweetened with honey, not sugar.  Sprouts grown on the windowsill, handmade quilts. Handwritten cookbooks people would share, the beards and long hair of the late seventies, where, in Alaska, things had not shifted yet and people were hopeful, had moved to make change real. People came there to find themselves, and very often, they were the people who lived outside the system or were not accepted. 

We were still five years behind the culture wave of the rest of the United States.

Shortly after we moved to Hawaii, and there the 1980's were in effect, materialistic and hairsprayed and those that lagged wore liesure suits.  Another One Bites the Dust blared from the car stereos as we crossed the busy street on the way to school. It was a big change from the guitairs, and Gordon Lightfoot I'd known before. Wall to wall carpet smelling of chemicals, pools with people who came to be perminently on vacation, and heat, body oil, and that infidelity song about the man who places the ad in the paper. My father had cancer, I remember the smell of chemotherapy and vomit. We went through the trash in the park, gathering up tin cans to recycle.

My mother hated it, and after a few years we came to Seattle. I remember downtown, the child and teenage prositutes that congregated around Pike Place Market. We sat for long hours in Pioneer Square, feeding pigeons, while parents look for work or places to live. Coffee in paper cups, paper bags of popcorn. Long bus rides after being soaked in the rain, and a certain downtrodden hopelessness that filtered through everything. Boeing had done massive layoffs.  

People in our neighborhood surrendered children to Child Protective Services, or sent them to live with relatives as there was no work, no food, and social services were thin. Dad was still ill, he'd walk around the waterfront looking for work, and he'd get free coffee from the Millionair's Club or places like that. My mom took us to pick blackberries by the side of the highway, or apples from some of the trees that remained after the road was built in, splitting up orchards. The Green River murderer dumped bodies.

The rain came down and drummed our roof, and she moved us to rural Washington.  Economic despair was there, and we struggled. Some of my friends lived in "fifth wheelers" or single wide trailers with blue tarps over the roof. We lived in a convereted commercial chicken house. The smell of chickens was pervasive, and there was no insulation in the walls. The floors were plywood, and uneven, someone had simply stapled carpet on top of them and in places, used glue to hold it down, including the bathroom. The house was sinking into the mud, so we had to crawl underneath and use car jacks to push it up. We tore up the stained and mouldy carpet that was saturated with animal leavings from the people before, scrapped, pulled nails, and saved up to put down 3/4 plywood on the floor. We salvaged a couch from one of the outlying buildings, dried it in front of the wood stove which was our only source of heat, and accepted that it always had a damp smell. We could only afford one can of paint, so we watered it down to paint over the fly specs on the walls. We salvaged a dresser from the other buildings that had to be torn down as they filled with animal feces. We bagged up garbage, a mount of it as high as the house, dispersing rats. When the rats ran at us, the pitbull terrier dog Minnie we'd adopted from the local vet ran to defend her children. She grabbed rats and snapped their necks, sending them flying in the air. She was the gentlest soul, the greatest treasure and find of a dog. We cleaned the land, we allowed it to restore itself, to grow thick with vegetation where too many horses and cows had been kept. We learned the names of the plants, we learned the shape and flow of the subterranian river that flowed underneath it. At night, when we lay down, we could hear the river run under the house. 

The property came with animals. The people before us had trapped wild geese and ducks, and then fed them so they stayed on the pond. We inherited a vast array of ducks of all kinds. We were unsure how to keep them, so my mother got books from the library and asked around. We tore down the chickenhouses built over the streams as it dirtied up the water in the pond. We set them free range, and I learned to outsprint the rooster and the gander. There were frogs the size of a throw pillow and as small as my thumbnail. I know how to start a fire and thaw and burn frozen wood. I can cook on a wood stove. We put in gardens and I found a nearby abandoned apple orchard, likely one of the original white colonial settlers to the area. We picked apples, Surveyor's Berries, blackberries, wild hazelnuts, mint, and dark rooted, thick, damp watercress before I knew the word "forage". Soon most of our food came from our garden.  I explored the woods around, for miles and miles, sometimes with just a buck knife, or when I was older, a pellet gun or even a pistol. Strange to me to think that I had and carried my own pistol at sixteen, but there were still cougars and other wild animals you may want to scare off.

The library in town was tiny, but so good.  It was the size of a master bedroom, and right beside the jail. I read so much from there, and I rode the school bus and hated the local schools and eventually commuted out of our rural community to a private college prep school. It took me a car ride, three buses and an hour and a half each way but I did it and then I got a scholarship to NYU. The morning I left for New York City I got up and walked down to the duckpond, one last time.

These are all the parts I carry inside me. Despite the struggles of that time, my nervous system was not a wreck from how we lived. There is a centered part of me that knows that much in me can be solved by the pure joy of physical labor that betters a place. Inside me is a girl who finds abandoned orchards, who always knew how to make cookies and tea from scratch, who knows that the joy of a salvaged couch means that there is no harm a dog can do to it and thusly the dog can always sit on the couch. I loved the people I met and how they taught me. How to catch a fish and cook it on a campfire, but not in an REI camping sense. How to read a river, follow tracks, find a trail. Fridge pickles, the merit of coffee grounds, how to layer cardboard to make a garden.

I am born and live with hope in me, it is a feathered thing, indeed. It is in ducklings in the park, who know me and let me close, it is in the crows I feed in the alley, it is in the starling baby I found at the barns while riding recently. I thought it dead and picked it up, but once I saw it was still living I held her to warm her. There is a woman who lives and works at the barn, she speaks no English and I speak little Spanish saw me and came to me immediately. We both spoke bird, and hope, I passed the baby to her and the little bird is thriving now.

The summer I was thirteen I went back to Alaska. I worked with my aunt who groomed dogs. We groomed a lot of sled dogs. During my work there I met a woman who owned a fishcamp. We stayed overnight at her house, I slept downstairs, and admired the photographs of her from when she was young, and a model. Her name was Susan, and she left Seattle, and Mercer Island,t o come and live in Alaska, own her own fish camp, and wear nothing but soft flannels.  I understand now a little why someone would do that, but at the time it did not make sense to me. I longed to work on a film set, to be in that world, and that she had it and left was confusing.

I do not want to own a fishcamp. I don't need a retreat from my life, but I need the interior spaces within me to be larger, expand, breathe. 

I need to work, work is, actually, a pleasure of life, but I do not want it to destroy my body any longer. I need to separate the things thrust upon me that are the agreed upon things to panic about and be upset about and say, I will not.  This panic that I carry during work, the hard feeling of my swollen lymphs, the fight or flight, I want to let this part go. I am freer when I do not need things, as I can work less. 

I do not think people in my daily life know that these things are part of me. I still like a couch that can hold a dog.  I still know where hidden rivers run in run.

I need to heal. I did not know it started here.

May and June have spilled open their fruit. It is the season of throwing graduation caps in the air, and people saying, " you may kiss the bride!" My birthday closed my forty seventh year on the planet, and opened my forty eighth. My first film project in my 48th year is a documentary.

So much has happened. The town is sluggish with lack of work, the air smells faintly of salt water because salt is everywhere. 

Every Tuesday and Friday I drive an hour outside the city. I turn off one main country road to a smaller one, until finally I drive down a lane. A black Fresian gelding, and a black mini horse cavort together in a field. I drive past the stables, to a long line of horse trailers. There I tuck my small car, and finish the last sips of my coffee. Ahead of me, in the field, entirely on his lazy, lies Samwise. He is a Gypsy Vanner horse, the horse of a friend and while he is usually playful and frisky, he adores rolling in the dust and mud after a bath. Horses, I have learned, greatly enjoy being dirty.

I love the stables this time of day, when the morning is fresh and the doves coo and call to each other. Blueberry and Muffin, the golden eyed teenagery cats dart around, hunting me as I walk. Some horses are in stalls, but most are turned out. I still have yet to see anyone, though evidence of work is all around. Clean pavement glistens from its wash. Water pails are full.  I go to the tack room, choose my saddle, and get Grand's bridle from the wall.

Grand is one of the older lesson horses. Over thirty years old, he has a leadership streak that makes him more challening. He is used for adults, but even then one must be aware that he can be difficult. I walk to the field where he grazes and he looks up at me, accepting being caught with only the resistence of one pull or tug. We walk back to the barn where I begin the process of grooming him, picking out his feet, and tacking him up. 

Today we began to learn to jump. 

Grand and I have been studying dressage together. They tried me on two horses, one that I thought possibly was asleep throughout the lesson, the other simply decided she did not like me. Grand was another try, a tall gentleman who has serious considerations for his herd. I have seen him whinny and strain when the babies are brought in for the farrier. As I lead him to and from the stable, it is not uncommon for the other horses to run to greet him, whinnying. He is popular, and deeply social. The first time I rode him he resisted me. Now he often comes to me, trusting me enough to groom his face and the spot he likes best. brushed gently, right between his ears. He is excellent at dressage, and responsive once I urge him beyond a disintersted walk and he knows I am serious about trotting. He has also come to know me as I know that the left right hoof is sensivtive, that he sometimes stumbles on his left and that he prefers a strong handle on the bridle instead of leading with my legs.

He likes me. I think that won some esteem among the instructors. 

Today we are just stepping over logs stacked, but we move quickly from a walk to a trot and then he casually takes me into a canter. We are not supposed to canter yet, but I'm seated well on him and he goes for a bit before he minds Kayla who calls to him. I started lessons for my job, now I am riding for me. I like this powerful, opinionated fellow, a beautiful bay horse. I wonder who he worked with for so many years, before he was sold into retirement to give lessons. I do not think I could do this to my friend but perhaps I do not know. He is beloved by the instructors at the barn, though he gives the fewest lessons because he is so spirited. It is clear to us both that he loves to jump, though he's not allowed to fully jump any longer due to his age. No one has to tell me that I am learning quickly. 

My life is uncomfortable with growth right now. My son leaves soon, there will be travel all summer before I meet him in San Jose for college. I have accepted and will attend a low residency Writing for Film and Television MFA program. 

I just submitted my book to an agent friend, who, strange to say, I have known thirty years. He agreed he'd read my book.

Seattle rains as it does in June. Every evening I sojourn to the duckpond in Volunteer Park to visit the clutches of ducklings there. I write and clean and prepare for my documentary shoot. I apply for full time jobs so I can continue my riding habit and pay the remaining balance my scholarship for grad school does not cover. I daydream of eventing. I heal myself in the singular focus of human and horse. I emerge from my Fridays tired, rested, and whole, smelling of Grand and hay. 

I am shy and not always welcoming to what comes next. As I age, change is harder. I turn the dial on the things that I know will keep me healthy. Age, and hypothyrodism and a bad bout of COVID lead to a massive weight gain. Since January I have lost twenty pounds. By December I hope to lose twenty more. Riding is part of that, the vitamins are part of it. Transition and grief are not tipped out into wine glasses or coffee cups any longer (though I still enjoy small amounts of each) and I seek sleep, long, deep hours of sleep.

By September, I will know what happens next.

Until then, I will tell you what I know, here.

I made some improvements to OnePo this week. Specifically:

• I brought back the ability to insert more text, image and video blocks in between existing blocks in your post. Personally I found it too crazymaking to always add things at the bottom and then nudge them up.
• However, there were user experience concerns expressed about that being too much before. This is why I took a stab at a better experience for it: the buttons to add new blocks are nestled in a single "+" toggle above each existing block, and you can toggle it closed again.
• Speaking of nudging things up from the bottom, that was not a great experience either, particularly if you had to nudge something with the arrows ten times. So now we drag blocks around instead.

These changes work well on desktop, should also work well on tablets (let me know if you get the chance to try it), and work okay on mobile. I do find the new experience of dragging an image a little weird on the iPhone, but it works and hopefully I can continue to fine-tune it.

However... these changes are a bit selfish. There's nothing wrong, obviously, with putting my own uncompensated free time into features I like. Honestly! The nerve of this guy!

But, I've also promised alt text for images and that's a matter of accessibility. So I will get back to that next.

Alt text will be easiest to add for images in posts, because those are full-blown blocks in the editor. Adding one more editable field to them is no big deal.

But for images in comments, it's necessary to rethink the user experience. Right now it's a bit of a hack: "just pick an image and it'll upload and bam your comment is live!" That's cute, but it closes the door on adding alt text before your comment is live. And also there is currently no way to edit an existing image comment. So yeah, rethink.

I did carry out some interesting experiments in that area recently, which also included improvements to the image uploading experience. If I manage to carry that through, image uploads will be a lot faster because the browser will be doing the initial resizing work if necessary.

Circa 2002, Meredith Tanner posted a stylized version of this picture titled "BABY".  My son refuses to believe that he was a meme at such an early age.  Does anyone have a copy of the BABY icon?  Failing that, will you at least attest to the fact that you remember it?

So you're at the public pool. You finally managed to learn to keep your head above water all by yourself.

Then, you get splashed a lot and when you look around, you realize that you're in a pool where olympic athletes come to do their laps. You're surrounded by them.

Then someone comes along and says "Guess what folks, we figured out individual motor boats. No need to know how to swim anymore!"

Makes it kinda hard to keep your head above the water.

* * * * *

In case it's not abundantly clear - I'm kinda burning out. I'm still plugging along, but my heart's not really in it. There's a tremendous sense of "What's the point?"

Anyway - the image(s) up top are what I did today on my day off (rain).

Tried a new technique. Someone pointed out in one of the videos I watched that there's no real reason to stick to the old process of a. pencils, b. inks, c. color flats, and d. rendering because that was designed for the comics of old based on physical limitations created by the printing process. So if you're working digitally...

So I went straight from 'pencils' to 'painting'. Dunno. There's some good texture in there, but I think I should have spent more time on the figure's silhouette. The arms get a bit confusing.

The pose was based a little on the third one below - all of which I did yesterday just to be 'putting pen to paper'.

I think we should ban the use of the phrase "game changer" and related buzz words.

If I hear one more YouTuber talk about how this shade of yellow is a TOTAL GAME CHANGER or how the nuance of this tiny adjustment to something someone else has been doing for years "totally changes everything" I'm going to have to crush someone under my foot, and since I am not in the presence of said YouTuber - because, YouTube - that means some poor schlub is going to receive a significant dose of violence not meant for them.

I think that it would be perfectly reasonable, for example, to laugh out loud and point directly at the next person you hear say "this is a game changer". And keep laughing until they leave the room or start crying.

It's obnoxious, and it's one of those things that isn't going to change because no one will do something like what I described above.

Harumph, and get off my lawn!*

[editor's note: On the off chance that you're reading this and don't know me IRL, let me be clear: I am NOT actually advocating for violence or even actual shaming someone. I'm just being grumpy and venting about something I find utterly ridiculous and annoying.]

*That shouldn't really be a problem because I don't have a lawn. 😜

Whoa. Check that out - emoticons italicize?!

Yes. There are actually things that are game changers. Due to the fact that they actually change things significantly, they happen super rarely.

So belief in something creates a god (or goddess or...) of that thing. Even a small amount of faith - by billions of people - adds up.

Goddess of Footwear.

God of the Monsters Under the Bed.

Goddess of Walks in the Park.

God of Brunch.

You get the idea.

I'd love to collect a series of short stories by authors more skilled than myself for a compendium where I illustrate each god(dess).

I could imagine short stories on everything from their daily existence to their creation to the indirect effects of their existence on the rest of us.

Diversity in both the sorts of gods as well as the types of stories would be the point. My art would be the only consistent thing throughout the book, because I think there needs to be a visual consistency to avoid being distracting.

Consider this Creative Idea Number 734098450893278 that I won't ever be able to get to. :(

Anyway - the image up top is the latest Twitter thing I'm doing. The place is a cess pool, and keeps glitching for me, but my little corner seems (relatively) unaffected, so I keep going. Seems like it is (overall) circling the drain though.

If any of you would like to play, I made a template that prints out to 8.5 x 11 with light lines so you can use paper and pencils/pens:

As I was sitting watching a band last night, I started thinking about Austin. I seem to know a lot of random things about Austin. I'm going to list them, but I didn't fact check anything, so believe at your own risk.

The 11 things I know about Austin:

1. There is a garden south of there by LadyBird Johnson focused on butterflies
2. The have bats under a bridge
3. They are home to Austin Typewriter, Ink - a typewriter collective and podcast group
4. Univ of Texas aka UT is there. It has some big balls sculpture on campus somewhere
5. They like to keep it weird
6. They have a party street whose name escapes me. It isn't Beale. It isn't Burbon.
7. There is that tech conference / music conference there. I forget its name also.
8. They have a small track train you can ride in the park.
9. Willie Nelson has a ranch not to far from Austin. There was a big music fest there last year. Or maybe 2 years ago. Or maybe every year.
10. My lovely friend Bronwen lives there. I haven't seen her in neigh on 10 years. Sad face.
11. The band Stackabones originated there, before they moved to Delaware-ish, so I can hear them on a random Saturday night.

eta:

oh lord. I just realized this is a repost.  
​​​​​​​
leaving it up though because I'm trying to figure out how to edit it down for the Moth and this is a better version than the one I posted a few years ago. 

--

After Sharon and I split up a few years ago, we gave notice to our landlord that we'd both be moving out before the end of February. As it turned out, Sharon found a new place almost immediately and was fully moved out by Candlemas. I took a week or two longer but eventually found myself an interesting house near Northgate - a rental property owned by a couple I had known socially for a few years.

They initially told me the place would be available March 1 but, being amateurish landlords, they were caught flatfooted when their would- be-former tenant decided around Valentine's Day that they didn't want to become former for another month. Housing in Seattle being what it is, I figured it would be easier to find an interim place for a few weeks (even if it meant staying in a hotel or something) than it would be to start the housing search over again from zero with only a week or two of runway left.

So I told them I still wanted the place and that I'd be fine with a lease starting in April - and then I was off to Craigslist where, almost immediately, I found a sublet: room in a shared house, available February 23 through April 5, VERY reasonably priced, and walking distance from work and from some pubs I liked (an important consideration, see above re: relationship just ending).
It seemed too good to be true - especially since housing scams were (as I suppose they still are) rife on Seattle craigslist at the time. But I dropped a note anyway and got a response almost immediately from some cat named Carl Kinch [name changed to protect the presumed innocent]. 
 
I naturally got right to googling and found a person by that name who was the keyboardist for Northwest indie band <<redacted>>. This was non-dispositive information with regard to on-the-up-and-upness of the housing offer, because 1. it could very well be identity theft, 2. it's an uncommon name but not impossible there could be a 2nd guy called that, and 3. northwest indie band members are almost certainly less trustworthy than the average person.

So I needed more research.

My next step was to Facestalk the fellow. His profile there seemed legit - locations visited seemed like a match for the house's ostensible location - and we had a friend in common. I dropped my pal Dagmar a note and said "hey, I see you're Facefriends with Carl Kinch. I'm thinking of subletting a room from him. Do you have any information that might make me want to decide against that?"
She replied and said "the only thing I really know about Carl Kinch is that he once punched my ex-boyfriend in the face."

Evidently, Dagmar's ex-boyfriend had, after their time together, begun an affair of some sort with Carl's then-girlfriend. Carl must have gotten wind of it somehow because D'sXBF was sitting at home one day, heard a knock at the door, went and answered it, and there - standing in the doorway - was one Carl Kinch, who wordlessly punched him right in the face, turned, and walked away.
This was entertaining but didn't strike me as a deal-breaker in the sublet department, so I made an appointment to stop and look at the house after work the next day.

Carl seemed nice (if a little more full of himself than the keyboardist for a mid-level Northwest indie band has any business being) and the house was lovely. Worn down, but lovely. It was an old place - probably built in the 20s - situated at the top of steep front yard on the once-most-charming, now-least-charming side of Seattle's overall- highly-charming Wallingford neighborhood. There were great hardwood floors - an overgrown and muddy but attractive garden out back - a nice porch out front with wicker chairs and all - and two other occupants of the house, neither of whom were home at the time.

Carl was headed out of town for a 5-6 week trip to Thailand with his girlfriend (a new one he'd met after he punched Dagmar's ex) and wanted to defray his travel costs by renting out his bedroom (and full use of the house's common areas) while he was away.
I made out a deposit check and signed a sublet agreement on the spot.
That weekend, I moved all of my non-essential stuff into a storage unit, brought about 8 boxes and 2 suitcases over to the Wallingford House and picked up the keys. Carl introduced me to one of the other occupants whom he said would be the main decision-maker and point of landlord contact in his absence. The room was to be mine the following morning. I went back to the old place, cleaned the carpets, and sacked out on a camping pad. The next day, it was Wallingford for me.

Over the following few weeks, the house itself turned out to be more or less as advertised. The occupants, however, were a little peculiar. Housemate #1 (let us call him Taciturn) was...well...taciturn. He spent almost all of his time in his bedroom with the door closed. Once in a while, I'd bump into him in the kitchen and he would kind of reluctantly say hello and then go on about his business. I had temporarily resumed a long dormant habit of having an occasional cigarette at night (see above re: relationship just ending) and Taciturn evidently had the same habit so sometimes we'd find ourselves on the front porch at the same time. He would sometimes have brief conversations with me at such times - but, just as often, he would come out, spot me there, and go around the corner of the house to the backyard so that he could have his smoke without having to talk. This was the entire extent of all of my interactions with Taciturn for the first 3 weeks I lived there.

The OTHER guy (let us call him Taciturner) never spoke to me at all. In fact, it was probably a week of living there before I ever saw the motherfucker at all. He seemed to ALWAYS be home though - in his bedroom - with the door closed and the light on. I mean, 24/7. He was in his room with the door closed and the light on. I'd get up at 8 to go to work - dude's door was closed and light was on. I'd come home from work at 5 or 6 - dude's door was closed and light was on. I'd go to bed at 11 or 12 or 1 - door closed, light on. I'd get up to pee at 4 AM - same same same. It was one one of those last occasions (4 AM pee trip) that I actually saw him for the first time. I passed him in the hall as he was leaving the bathroom. He looked startled to see me - grunted something non-verbal - and went back into his room and closed the door (with the light on). And THAT was the entire extent of all of my interactions with Taciturner for the first 3 weeks I lived there.

"Wait!" one may well ask, "are you trying to imply that something different happened at around the 3 week mark?"

Yes.

Yes I am.

And I will now describe with, hand to God, no exaggeration or fabrication whatsoever, exactly what happened then.

The weekend after my third week there, I headed out of town on a Friday night for a quick one day trip to the rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula. My pal Rick Elsmere [name also changed because reasons] owned a cabin out there on the south fork of the Hoh River and, on a visit a couple months earlier, we had accidentally locked the cabin and truck keys inside the place. The only way to get to them or get home was to break a window, so that's what we did - and, with keys retrieved, we patched the window with the tried and true method of nailing a big piece of plywood over it. The piece of plywood we used was, in fact, one that we had set up the former summer as a shooting target down at the old abandoned quarry where people up there go to do their target shooting, so it had a big orange bullseye spraypainted on it. I commented at the time that it seemed like a clear invitation to the users of the couple other nearby cabins to pump the Elsmere cabin full of lead, but it's a really remote area and really ugly in the winter, so most of the neighbors don't make any trips out there until spring. By the time March rolled around however, we figured we'd better get out there and fix that window pretty darn soon.

So I took the ferry over to Bainbridge Island Friday night and spent the night at Elsmere's place in Poulsbo(tique). I think we went out and had Italian. I'm pretty sure I got the eggplant parm. I guess that's not important. In any case, we wanted to make our repair trip an out-and- back-in-one-day type of thing - which is a little challenging because it's a good 3 hours each way from Poulsbo...assuming no detours because of the forest service roads being washed out, no situations where we have to chainsaw our way through toppled trees across the road, etc. And we didn't know how long it was going to take us to install the new window.
So away we went at 9 AM and everything went off without a hitch. We made the trip in record time, the cabin was intact with no new bullet holes, and we got the window replaced in under an hour. We were back on the road by 1 PM and were in Poulsbo by late afternoon. I got a quick shower chez Elsmere because I had plans to meet a couple pals for Cheap Wine and All You Can Eat Cheese Night at one of the fancy downtown hotel bars, and indeed those plans shortly came to pass. I had a jolly good time (and a jolly good helping of cheese) with my pals and didn't head back toward the Wallingford House until 11ish. The whole way home, I was thinking what a wonderful and very full day it had been. But it was far from over.

I knew as soon as I started up the front walk that something felt off. The first (and only, as far as I knew at that point) indication of offness was that I happened to arrive at the long stairs up to the front yard from the street at the exact same time as Taciturn. This was strange because I had never seen him actually go anywhere in the evening before. But there he was, looking like he might be about to have a facial expression, and saying a comparatively polite hello to me as we headed up toward the porch.
We came through the front door together and holy shit. The downstairs, normally dark and chilly, was lit up like a goddamn Christmas tree and there was an almost merry heat coming from the kitchen. We proceeded on into said kitchen and there was Taciturner...cooking away at something in a pot on the stove.

This was unheard of, in my experience.
I had NEVER seen Taciturner even enter the kitchen before - nor any signs of cooking activity or food consumption on his part anywhere at any time.

But there he was. And whatever was in his pot smelled pretty good.

He looked up at us and said, in a thrusty sort of tone that could have been either anger or ebuliance, "Look! I made chili! Do you want some?"

"Shit yeah" I thought, having had nothing to eat so far that day other than an english muffin and a mound of free cheese. I grabbed myself a bowl.

Taciturn made no motion toward any sort of container, but continued to stand in the kitchen watching us and saying nothing.
Taciturner ladeled me out a nice couple of scoops of chili into my bowl and then picked up his own bowl that had already been sitting on the island counter. He didn't make any move to eat anything from it...but he held it.

I took a couple bites and it was pretty good, but the feeling of offness was growing. Mainly, it was the fact that both of them - Taciturn and Taciturner - were just standing there staring at me - watching me eat - but doing nothing themselves - and they had lapsed back into their customary silence.

"Hey," I said, "this is pretty good chili. What's in it? Is this chicken?"

No reaction. No response.

Stare stare stare.

"Hmm," I said, "and this looks like a piece of pork. Is this some sort of multi-meat kind of recipe?"

No reaction. No response. Continued staring.

"Alright. Fine," I thought, "I'm not gonna play with these fuckers. You wanna play Stare in Silence - let's dance, assholes. I can stare silently like a fucking PRO. I'm a SCORPIO."

So there we were. All staring. None talking. Me picking at my chili but by now feeling an strong, uneasy prickling which made me slow my rate of consumption, then stop. I put my 1/4 finished bowl down on the counter island and went back to staring. (Taciturner had put his bowl down by then as well.)

Long pause. Long stares. Then

All of a sudden

Taciturner made a strange jerking, twitching sort of movement from side to side with his jaw...

and a stream of vomit came welling up out of his mouth and dripping down his chin onto his chest and the floor.

Now listen.

I've seen my share of vomiting (as have, I'm sure, we all). This was unlike any other vomiting I've ever seen. He wasn't heaving. He wasn't coughing. He wasn't gagging or retching or any of those other great evocative emesis words.

He was just standing there.

And the vomit was welling up out of him. Or maybe oozing. It had an oozing sort of quality as well. Have you ever seen one of those cat drinking fountains? Where there's a water reservoir at the bottom and a slow bubbling at the top where the pump pushes the water out without a ton of real tinkling or splashing or anything? Have you ever seen what they're like when the pump gets a little clogged with cat hair and the slow bubbling becomes more of a sluggish ooze?

Well, like that. Furthermore...

There are several things that a regular person might do when they find vomit starting to come out of their mouth. They might run to the nearest toilet (there was a toilet right upstairs). They might try to get to a sink (there was a sink 5 feet from this guy). They might grab a bowl (this dude had LITERALLY just been holding a bowl 2 minutes earlier - it was WITHIN ARM'S REACH) and pull it forward to catch the vomit. They might, oh I don't fucking know, LEAN OVER so that the vomit is going onto the floor directly rather than making its way there via their chin, shirt, and pants.
But not this guy.

He just stands there, motionless, still staring at me, not breaking eye contact even, as vomit just oozes right out of his mouth and all down his front.

AND IT GOES ON - it just keeps coming out.

Seriously.

Take how long you think is probably a reasonable amount of time for a vomiting session to last, then take how long you'd probably guess I'm talking about when I say it went on longer than that - then add those two numbers and that's probably pretty close to how long it actually went on.
We're not talking a quick little yack. This was a gusher. A slow motion, oozing gusher.

So.

After a goodly while of this, it finally subsides and stops bubbling out.

There's a short awkward silence broken only by the drip drip of vomit off his shirt and face onto the floor around his feet.

And I say "holy shit. what the hell was that? are you ok?" Silence. Staring.

"No...seriously man...that looked really messed up! Are you ok?" Silence. Staring.

Long pause.

Then Taciturner speaks.

And he says, slow and deliberate, but with this creepy confrontational intensity:

"Yeah...
I'm ok...
Are YOU ok?"

I blink a little and say "uh. yeah, I'm fine. thanks for asking. but then, I didn't just ooze vomit out of my mouth for a couple minutes nonstop like a goddamn hair-clogged cat fountain. so...like...are you actually ok? what's going on here?"

And there's a long pause.

And then he just walks out of the kitchen, goes up the stairs and into this room, and closes the door (with the light on)...leaving a dripping trail of vomit all the way.
The stove is still on, the chili pot still bubbling away, and I'm seriously losing my shit.

I look over at Taciturn, who has just been standing there watching the entire incident in silence, and I say "what the hell just happened here? what's up with that guy? is he ok?"

Taciturn says, with almost no hesitation, and in a tone like he's exchanging pleasantries at a bus stop, says "he seems fine to me"...
and walks out of the room...goes upstairs and into his room... and closes the door.

...

...

Well.
I pick up my bowl of chili and am like "NOPE!" and dump it right back into the pot. Then I turn off the stove and go up to MY room and close the door...leaving the steaming pot cooling on the stove and the LARGE POOL OF STEAMING VOMIT cooling on the floor.

--

It was at this point in one prior telling of this story that my pal Dr John interrupted me to say "welp. that's it. you ate human flesh."

And I know others who read this might have had the same thought flicker around the edges of their mind, as indeed did it flicker around mine on the very night of the incident.

And I'm not going to say I definitely DID eat human flesh. I mean. It was probably chicken and pork.

But I will say this: if there were an afterlife (there's not) and some divine or semi-divine figure existed there (they don't) and they were to say to me "you had a pretty good life - except for that time you inadvertantly ate human flesh", I'D HAVE NO DOUBT IN MY MIND WHICH OCCASION THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT.

And I'm not sure many people can say that.

--

I didn't sleep very well at night in that house for my remaining couple weeks there. I kept having these thoughts as I went to sleep "what if the whole sublet thing is just some honeypot that these people use to lure in next month's chili ingredient?" etc. I kept my door closed and latched at night, usually sleeping in a half-awake sort of hypervigilant state...listening for the door knob to rattle or the latch to move.

Nothing of the sort ended up happening. Perhaps my vigilance paid off.

I went downstairs the morning after the first of these nights - the initial incident - and someone had cleaned up the kitchen - no idea who or when.

--

I only saw Taciturner once more.

My next to last day, I packed up all my shit and moved a few boxes I had stashed in the basement up into the front hallway. As I was finishing up, Taciturner came in from outside. I had never seen him leave the house and hadn't seen him at all since Barfpurgisnacht, but somehow, I had lost my capacity to be surprised or impressed by anything these lunatics did.

"Hey, what are you up to?" he asked, like a friendly normal person would.

"I'm packing up my shit to get going. Carl comes back tomorrow night and my new house at Northgate is ready for me, so I'm headed out tomorrow morning."

"NO!" dude says. "You should STAY!" um.

"Sorry. I can't. It's been nice being here. See you around perhaps." I didn't want to get into a whole big thing - I just wanted to get out without being turned into stew.

--

I saw Taciturn a few more times, coming and going and smoking and heading to or from peeing, but we never spoke again. Except on my last morning there.

I had just carried the first of my boxes out to my car when he passed through the downstairs hallway.

"Moving out?" he asked.

"Yep."

"Need a hand?"

"Uh. Yeah. Sure. That would be really nice actually."

I was frankly a little surprised at the offer, but my knee was sore and there were a lot of steps down to the street from the front door.

But then there was a pause. "Oh" he said, "you mean now?"

"uh. yeah. I'm hauling this stuff out now. So if you want to help, now is the time."

"Ok. Cool." he said, "I'll be right back."

And he went charging up the stairs toward his bedroom - I assumed to put on shoes or something.

He never came back.