Tomatoes are next. I've picked the second crop, and it's tomato: the most-grown, most-photographed, most-argued-about plant in the garden and the field. Starting now, I'm building tomato diagnosis the same way I built the first one.

The problems between here and a tomato model

The lookalike exam. Early blight, septoria, and late blight read almost alike at the stage where catching them matters most – a pinhead spot on an oldest leaf. Telling them apart from a photo, early, is the whole job. Everything else is plumbing.

Real photos, not textbook photos. Field tomatoes grow in crowded, backlit canopies with dirt-splashed lower leaves. Textbook single-leaf shots are easy. The photos growers actually take are the ones that have to work.

Trust is per-crop. Whatever the lab proved on its first crop, tomato doesn't inherit it. The model earns trust in the field, against the hard cases, or it doesn't earn it at all. Starting from zero is the price of doing it right.

It ships when it clears the same bar the live crop cleared, and I'll post the real numbers as they come.

Watch it happen at plantlab.ai/platform, or get notified there when tomato's status changes.

PlantLab had its name from day one, and the name was the plan: a diagnosis lab for plants, all of them, eventually. One crop is live today. Tomato, apple, grape, and leafy greens sit on the public roadmap. The long game is a lab that carries what it learns from one crop into the next.

A lab, not an app

I built the first model because I needed the answer myself. A general-purpose chatbot looked at my plant and said calcium deficiency. It was light burn. The opinion arrived instantly and was wrong in the way that matters: confident and useless.

That failure set the bar for everything since. The problems worth catching are lookalikes – deficiencies that impersonate each other, pests that impersonate deficiencies, stress that impersonates both. Trust gets earned on the hard cases, not the easy ones. An app can answer for one plant. A lab keeps a discipline that has to hold for every plant after it.

The long game: crops that teach the lab

Each crop the lab takes on teaches it something the next one needs. Reading leaves at the pinhead stage on one crop is exactly the skill the next crop needs on day one. Calibrated confidence is a habit, not a feature: a result that says “I'm 40% sure, watch it” instead of guessing. Habits travel. So do reading each plant on its own and the honesty about uncertainty.

What the lab learns on tomato will make the grape work faster. What it learns on grape will make the leafy-greens work faster. That is the compounding bet: not one model, one crop, one market, but a lab whose judgment gets broader with everything it reads.

What doesn't carry

Each crop's lookalikes are their own exam. The answers don't transfer, and neither does the reputation. A grower's trust in what the lab does for one crop is not a blank check for the next. Every crop earns its own track record, from zero, in the field, against the hard cases. The second crop doesn't get the first crop's reputation for free.

The roadmap, plainly

The crop roadmap is public at plantlab.ai/platform: one crop live today, four more on the roadmap. The labels mean exactly what they say. Live means a deployed model doing the work. In development means work has genuinely started. Planned means intended, not started. No dates, because a date is easy to publish and impossible to keep honest.

The name was the plan. The lab grows into it.

To paint is to invite you into my dream, realms where anything is possible. Soft edges of understanding and experience rife with hope and the unexplored. We are there together, artist and lover interpreting the form and color in our own time and understanding. Sometimes delighted, sometimes sad, sometimes confused. Each experience personal and every journey differing.

Writing is inviting you to the knife’s edge of my reality, now, moments past or futures imagined. A moment or experience revealed in the precise detail of invention or observation. You come into my mind and you feel the pain and the joy, the tears and the exultation as I feel. We are bound on that journey in experience, feeling and understanding.

Music takes the precision of writing and combines it with the abstract qualities painting to create ethereal moments exploding with experiential thrill. Music is poetry. Music is painting. It is wide and narrow, dark and bright, loud and quiet.

2025-01-17 15:28:55

—

I'm reawakening my creative self.

As I've often said, entrepreneurship is my art. It's about the only creative thing I'm good at. Last year I took a bit of a sabbatical (which was perfect timing given the birth of our little girl), but I'm ready to start coming out of it.

I need to get used to expressing my creativity again, as I'm sort of out of practice, and I'm still wrapped up in my new life as a dad. That in itself has forced me to give creativity time and space and not to force anything. But that changes today. I'm giving myself permission to lightly explore some creative ideas as a way to warm up that part of my mind.

It feels good. Weird, as it has been a while, but pretty damn good.

#personal

GitBook.io är en webbaserad plattform för att skapa, organisera och publicera dokumentation och kunskapsmaterial. Tjänsten är särskilt populär bland företag, utvecklare och projektteam som behöver samla information på ett strukturerat sätt och göra den lättillgänglig för användare eller medarbetare.

Med GitBook kan man exempelvis skapa användarmanualer, produktdokumentation, guider, API-dokumentation, FAQ-sidor och interna kunskapsbanker. Informationen organiseras i sidor och sektioner, vilket gör det möjligt att bygga upp allt från en enkel guide till en omfattande dokumentationsportal. Dokumentationen kan publiceras offentligt på webben eller skyddas så att endast behöriga användare får tillgång till den.

En viktig funktion i GitBook är möjligheten att samarbeta kring dokumentationen. Flera personer kan arbeta med innehållet, kommentera och granska ändringar samt använda versionshistorik. Plattformen har stöd för Markdown och kan synkroniseras med GitHub och GitLab. Det gör att utvecklare kan arbeta med dokumentationen direkt från sitt vanliga kodflöde samtidigt som andra medarbetare använder GitBooks visuella redigerare.

GitBook innehåller även AI-funktioner. GitBook Agent kan hjälpa till att skapa, granska och hålla dokumentation uppdaterad, medan GitBook Assistant kan låta användare ställa frågor och få svar baserade på informationen i dokumentationen. Publicerat innehåll kan dessutom göras mer tillgängligt för AI-system genom bland annat Markdown, llms.txt och MCP.

Tjänsten passar därför bra för exempelvis ett företag som vill bygga ett hjälpcenter för sina kunder, ett utvecklingsteam som behöver dokumentera ett API eller ett projekt som vill samla instruktioner och teknisk information på ett och samma ställe. GitBook kan även användas som en intern företagswiki där rutiner, processer och annan kunskap samlas och hålls uppdaterad.

En av fördelarna med GitBook är att man inte behöver bygga en egen webbplats eller ett eget system för dokumentationen. Plattformen kombinerar redigering, strukturering, publicering, sökning och samarbete i samma tjänst. Det gör GitBook till ett praktiskt verktyg när information behöver vara lätt att hitta, enkel att uppdatera och tillgänglig för rätt målgrupp.

Här är ett exempel på hur Gitbook kan användas.

The pillar of cloud would not move away from before the people during the day, nor the pillar of fire at night.

I noticed driving home that the clouds were odd. In the land of big sky, you get used to every sort of cloud.

North of the city, out over the land toward the Red River, a huge plume of clouds covered the sky at least out to the Oklahoma border. It was kind of glorious, but the color was off. Instead of the usual blue/grey the clouds had a sickly yellow tint to them. Even some dark grey floating around.

It wasn't until I got a few miles closer that I could see the column connecting the clouds to the ground about 15 miles out.

It was an impressive fire, and thankfully out in the middle of nowhere. Though I doubt the terrestrial animals felt like it was the nowhere.

Coming over the bridge where I like to watch the sun set into the railroad tracks, I spotted this crusty old cowboy hat. Pulling off to capture it, I saw that it was well-worn, but not end of life. Some farmer is going to be plenty ticked off that he lost his favorite straw hat.

I left it there so when he comes back, he'll be able to reclaim it.

Standing there in 108º heat, with the sun cooking my back and the smoke burning my nostrils, I was stricken with how beautiful the moment was.

It turns out even hell has a good side.

Given the choice, most sane people would choose a beautiful mountainside with trees and lush grass. Or maybe a beach bungalow where the waves could lull them to sleep.

And I like those things. I think I'd choose them from a lineup. But the old adage 'bloom where you are planted' came to mind. There is good and bad to every place people dwell, but it absolutely floors me that there can be beauty in destruction.

If you gave me an unlimited budget and a capable team as well as all the time I needed to turn someplace into a paradise, I wouldn't choose something where most of the work was already done. Give me a Death Valley, a Badlands or a Dust Meridian any day.

Imagine the thrill of looking back over 20 or 30 years of terraforming and trying to convince people the place was once one of the most avoided locales in the world.

I ran into this heat map a few weeks ago. It shows distance in miles of how far away from a national park you are.

Now, you'll note that NY, FL panhandle and a few others are either red or yellow, indicating that maybe they're ugly places to visit. Nope. Just no parks designated by the federal government.

The streak from Galveston Texas to Minnesota is pretty telling. They don't call them the flyover states for nothing.

Unless you like sunsets. They're pretty glorious.

But imagine turning that corridor into one of the most attractive places on earth.

Now that's a task I could get behind. And I bet you could too.

HOW?

The funny thing about places nobody wants to be? You can get away with pretty much whatever you want. Without making a big deal of it, what if someone planted a few hundred thousand sequoias while no one was looking?

And I'm not saying Yellowstone is going to blow North America off the map, but a little tectonic action out here sure does have the potential to create some new and stunning vistas.

Fire is always gonna' fire. Burn it all down. But you know what? Some pretty damn amazing things come in the wake of destruction.

Look at Mount St Helens.

The richness of the soil in the aftermath is hard to deny.

And I think this applies to us emotionally as well.

We all go through periods where our worlds end. Losing a hat or two, or maybe our heads entirely. A paddock or the whole continent of our heart burns away.

And we, just like the land, are not done.

We're just prepped for what comes next. And sometimes, impossibly, what comes next becomes more precious than what was there before.

Honestly, I'm kind of counting on it.

So, let's stand here for a minute and appreciate that old hat.

Soak in the heat. The smoke. The scorching earth.

Hell has a strange way of making the land fertile again.

There is simply no telling what is going to grow here next.

Let's hope together that it is more glorious than we could have imagined.

---

Song of the day:

This Too Shall Pass – Okay Go – Of the Blue Color of the Sky (2010)

You know you can't keep letting it get you down And you can't keep dragging that dead weight around If there ain't all that much to lug around Better run like hell when you hit the ground

---

#music #essay

Black Queen by herself.

I won this game, part of a club-based CC tournament which started on 29-June, a few minutes ago when my Black Queen checkmated the White King on her 35...Qh3#. The position of pieces at game's end is shown above, and our full move record below:

1. e4 a6 2. Qh5 g6 3. Qe5 f6 4. Qc3 Bg7 5. d4 Nh6 6. f3 e6 7. e5 Nc6 8. Bd3 f5 9. Ne2 O-O 10. Nf4 b5 11. Nh3 Nf7 12. Ng5 Nxg5 13. h4 Nf7 14. O-O d6 15. Qxc6 Bd7 16. Qc3 dxe5 17. dxe5 Bxe5 18. Qc5 Bd6 19. Qd4 c5 20. Qc3 c4 21. Be2 Bc5+ 22. Be3 b4 23. Qxc4 Rc8 24. Bxc5 Re8 25. a3 b3 26. cxb3 Rc6 27. g4 Qxh4 28. b4 Ne5 29. Qf4 Nf7 30. Nc3 e5 31. Qc4 Be6 32. Nd5 Kg7 33. gxf5 Qg3+ 34. Kh1 Nd8 35. Rg1 Qh3#

And the adventure continues.

Your wonderful works are evident in creation.

They rise above the landscape, blaze with color, or stretch toward the sky. We stop to admire them because they are impossible to miss.

And then there are the small things.

The things we walk past.

The tiny flowers growing beside a path. The moss tucked into the cracks of a stone. The intricate veins of a leaf. A seed no bigger than a grain of sand, carrying within itself the promise of an entire plant.

They don't demand our attention. They invite it.

The Texas frogfruit is one of those quiet wonders.

At first glance, it is easy to overlook. Its flower heads are tiny, its stems slender, and it often grows close to the ground, mingling with the ordinary vegetation around it. Nothing about it seems designed to stop a hurried person in their tracks.

But stop.

Lean closer.

Look at it as though you have never seen a flower before.

Suddenly, the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

What appeared to be a simple little flower head reveals itself as a miniature constellation of petals—white and lavender blossoms arranged with almost jewel-like intricacy. Tiny forms overlap one another, each one contributing to the beauty of the whole. There are colors and textures and patterns that the casual glance completely misses.

It is a bejeweled spectacle hiding in plain sight.

And perhaps that is part of what makes small things so beautiful.

They require us to slow down.

The grandeur of a mountain can overwhelm us from a distance. The brilliance of a sunset can stop a conversation. But the beauty of a tiny flower asks something different of us. It asks us to become attentive.

To bend down.

To look again.

To discover that there is more here than we first imagined.

Creation is full of this kind of hidden magnificence. The closer we look, the more there is to see. A single flower is not merely a splash of color; it is an intricate architecture of petals, pollen, stems, shadows, and delicate relationships with the living world around it. A leaf is not merely green. A drop of water is not merely wet. Even the smallest seed contains a mystery far greater than its size suggests.

Smallness, it turns out, is no indication of insignificance.

In fact, some of the most astonishing things in creation are almost absurdly small.

We live in a world that trains our attention toward the large. Bigger achievements. Bigger houses. Bigger landscapes. Bigger experiences. Bigger lives.

But nature has another lesson for us.

Pay attention to the little things.

There is beauty in what doesn't shout.

The Texas frogfruit doesn't need to be magnificent by human standards. It doesn't need towering stems or enormous petals. It doesn't need to be rare or famous. It simply exists as what it was made to be—and when we take the time to truly see it, we discover that it is astonishing.

Maybe that's a lesson worth carrying with us.

How many beautiful things do we miss because we have decided, too quickly, that they are ordinary?

How many moments pass unnoticed because we're looking for something bigger?

How many tiny gifts surround us every day, waiting not to be found, but simply noticed?

The practice of paying attention changes the world—not because the world suddenly becomes more beautiful, but because we finally become awake to the beauty that was already there.

A tiny flower by the roadside becomes a cathedral in miniature.

A patch of sunlight becomes a painting.

A bird's song becomes a reminder that the world is still full of wonder.

And a little Texas frogfruit, easily passed by, becomes a jeweled spectacle.

Perhaps creation has always been speaking this way.

Quietly.

Patiently.

In small things.

We only have to stop long enough to look.

---

---

#museum #milepost

The 17th century French diplomat and cryptographer Blaise de Vigenère published a treatise on fire and salt. The title is literal — Traicté du Feu et du Sel — and the premise acts as alchemy at its most reductive, where the whole of transformation is compressed into a simple binary: two principles, two substances. Vigenère’s text, however, is actually stranger than its title suggests. It is not really about fire or salt. It is about the impossibility of speaking about anything for the first time. And the implication that an idea, once spoken, cannot be controlled or contained and may perpetuate beyond its source in ways its speaker never intended.

The treatise opens with Pythagoras. Not Pythagoras directly — no one has Pythagoras directly — but Pythagoras as received through tradition, “held to have made more profound search, and with less incertainty penetrated into the secrets as well of Divinity, as of Nature.” Already the syntax demonstrates the author’s argument: Vigenère is reading Pythagoras, who is reading the Mosaic tradition, who is reading — what? The mind of God, presumably, but even Moses received the law on tablets, which is to say, in written form, which is to say, as a text that was already a mediation, rather than a direct link to the mind of God — a shared consciousness. The chain has no first link.

This raises the question: are there other links in this chain lost to time? Or, better still, how do we trust any source of knowledge when its origins are so obfuscated or enigmatic?

Vigenère builds an elaborate scheme of attribution: Pythagoras borrowed from the Hebrews. The Egyptians and Chaldeans borrowed from both. Scripture conceals philosophy within ritual. Every source, when you press it, reveals a prior source beneath. Vigenère moves through these layers with the confidence of a man who has spent decades in the archives of other people's reading — which he had, literally: before writing on alchemy, he spent years translating and annotating classical texts, and before that, a foundational cipher of modern cryptography. He was a man professionally devoted to the idea that every surface meaning conceals a deeper one, and that the concealment is both method and feature rather than flaw.

This is the treatise's subtle radicalism. Vigenère never claims to have discovered anything himself. He does not position his text as a source but as a commentary — on Pythagoras, on Moses, on Mark 9:49 (“every man shall be salted with fire”), on a chain of prior readings stretching backward into a darkness he treats as generative rather than empty. And the remarkable thing is that his commentary feels enriched rather than diminished by its secondariness. Each layer of mediation adds a new context and texture. Vigenère reading Pythagoras is not a degraded copy of Pythagoras reading Moses. It is a new act of understanding that could not have existed without the distance spanned.

There’s also a serious epistemological claim, not just a historical curiosity. What Vigenère demonstrates — almost against his own intentions, since he would probably have said he was simply recovering ancient wisdom — is that knowledge does not degrade as it passes through commentary. It transforms. It acquires texture, context, contradiction—and, yes, flavor, the way fire and salt season food. This suggests that scholarly annotation in this method comes from within rather than passively from outside, the way a river that continues the rain that feeds it without becoming the rain itself.

We still seek originals. We distrust commentary. But this is precisely what Vigenère's chain of attribution makes impossible to sustain. There is no moment in his treatise where a source appears without already being a reading of something else. Moses is already interpreting. Pythagoras is already annotating. The “darke sentences” in which ancient knowledge arrives are not failures of transmission but the very form that deep knowledge takes — because what matters is not the content in isolation but the relationship between reader and text, the transformation that occurs when one mind meets another across the distance of centuries and tradition and language.

This is, I think, the secret argument of the Traicté du Feu et du Sel, hidden inside its alchemical metaphors the way Vigenère says philosophy is hidden inside scripture. Fire transmutes rather than destroys. Salt seasons the object, changing its nature through contact rather than merely preserving it. Some of these passages — on preservation, on the spaces between — I recognize all too well.

Commentary is the fire that transmits, not destroys. And what emerges from that intersection is not a diminished copy of some lost original but something new: knowledge that has transited a human mind, becoming something new but not altogether different from what had entered.

Perhaps there are no original texts. Perhaps all we have across the whole of human history are the ongoing commentaries of others past — some survived, some lost. Provenance falls away when meaning lives in interpretation alone. All of which would otherwise be impossible without someone first having named the unnamable, the sacred unmentionable somehow spoken. And once spoken, renders the anomalous more familiar.

#Philology

---

Notes:

1. My copy of Vigenère’s Traicté du Feu et du Sel is an English translation from roughly 1649. Though I find his ideas intriguing, I cannot speak to his traditions, nor the potential differences between the English and French versions of the text.

2. The alchemical opus transforms the practitioner alongside the substance in the vessel. The lapis is not just produced but undergone, meaning the text is already a record of anomalous experience: knowledge inseparable from the encounter that produced it.

3. Can anomalous experience even be articulated in the raw moment, becoming meaningful only through layers of interpretation and introspection afterward? Could mediation be the process by which the darke sentence reveals what was latent beneath the letter, rather than a distortion of it?

4. Might some knowledge require encryption to survive transmission, as Vigenère's cipher requires a key and his alchemy requires a veil? Is it possible that indirection serves not to obscure but to protect what cannot be stated directly?

5. Both alchemy and anomalous experience are relational: the alchemist needed the soror mystica, the student needed the master, the work could not be done alone or in full daylight; and the witness exists, not to verify the event empirically, but to receive the account and become the next link in the chain of knowing.

6. Alchemical transformation is irreversible: one does not un-calcine, nor reverse the nigredo. Could anomalous experience operate similarly, reorganizing the knower so permanently that the distinction between encounter and ordinary learning dissolves? Where does ordinary dream end and extraordinary vision begin?

---

By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Just a story about a story.

It’s been over two years since I logged into my last social media. It was BlueSky, and I ran across a batch of mean folks. I wasn’t talking to them. I didn’t have them in mind when I said what I said about a personal memory. They inserted themselves underneath my post to berate me and call me a fat white guy. I was like, “I am just telling a story that actually happened. What if there was an opinion in here?”

Do you need to hate so many people?

I find a lot of irony in folks feeling like they need social media to stay connected, yet they use social media to write off huge swathes of the population. Many folks feel like they need social media. I have felt that way before in my life. But nothing could be further from the truth. I promise.

Let’s mention brainwashing.

They wouldn’t call it brainwashing if you knew it was happening. Brainwashing doesn’t mean ‘I willingly take on a different mindset.’ So if you’re on social media, you don’t know what you don’t know. You may not know that sometimes folks really into their social media stuff can come off ridiculous and concerning. You may not know that your world is divided up into grid lines of good and bad, right and wrong, what’s cool and what isn’t. You may not realize you have whole populations on this planet that you would like to see dead. All the MAGAs, all the Muslims, all the Jews, all the Mexicans, all the liberals, all the Android users, the pesky Playstation fans. You may not realize your lack of control of your worldview. You may not realize the words on the screen appear because the screen knows your preferences. You may not realize it has cost you money and friends you can touch. You don’t “need” this shit.

What if I was a big corporation and I wanted to implant a commercial in your brain? I wanted you thinking about me 24/7. Without a moment to yourself? What if I wanted you on my software for hours on end so I could gather data about your environment and your preferences? What if I wanted people to become addicted to whatever I was making? I don’t think that would make me a good guy. Yet…

Maybe if you “need” social media, you simply “need” a hand.

I honestly think if you feel like you need social media, what you really need is help. You need the kind of help that isn’t on social media. You need the kind of help that hugs, that joins you for a meal, that talks to you about a movie you saw together, that likes your kind of music, that says things that are unexpected. A real-life connection, not online sycophancy. 

I have a lot of memories of being on social media and feeling wired. People would buzz around my brain. It would keep me awake, rolling words in my brain much like a slot machine in Vegas, and they were just words I saw on my feeds. They were words I wouldn’t have seen if not for algorithms and folks selling things. Me seeing them had nothing to do with who was writing them. It had to do with the computer thinking I wanted to see them. This changed the way I saw the world, eventually. I thought it was here for me. The truth is I’m here for it. So I put it down. Social media. Glad for it. Better too.

I am worried.

I talk about social media with people still using it. I’m concerned. They think we all need it. It connects us. It gives us presence. I’ve even been told I’m doing it wrong, and I’m the one who should get a social media. But I’ve been down that road. It’s not happening again.

I was not in control. Multiply that times billions. No thanks.

Kelly Kintner

The Horses Mouth

The Kintners

Djembe Funk

30 August 2026

Sat on the lawn at the MMCA in Seoul today from about 4-6pm. Around 5pm, an aproned chef cradling something in his arms walked out of a nearby restaurant and over to a wall, topped with black 기와 tiles, running along the street bordering the museum. It turned out he was holding food—he stood on his toes and reached up to neatly place eight single pieces of bread in a row on the tiles. When he was done he double checked his work for a brief moment, then quickly walked away without looking back. Maybe ten minutes later, a magpie flew down from a tree onto the wall and grabbed a piece of bread. Then another came down, then another.

Short post today because I need to wake up early tomorrow and I stayed up, but today while driving to the gym, I realized while talking to myself out loud that part of the reason why I liked creating things whether it’s a video or ace song or physical object is because after the day is done, I have something I can show, and that is important because with that days cannot just melt into each other, ultimately to be lost as a large haze. I think routine is very useful and has its benefits, but it comes sometimes at the risk of monotony and falling into the exact same cycle with nothing really tangible to show, and so I think it is important to recognize that and take care to carve out time to create small little things here and there.

Still in house-planning mode; found myself measuring all the things I'd like to have stored away that presently have no place to live and are thus resulting in abundant clutter. The purpose of these measurements, of course, is to design and build adequate storage space for all the things.

Does anybody else do things this way?

Ikea order incoming today, all things that will require assembly. So today will be a big “home stuff” day. Though I do have a few important emails to send out as well.

Awoke at 6:30 am despite falling asleep at 1:30 am. I've been waking up at 6:30 am on the regular for a few days now, no alarm clock save for the biological one. Which is a good thing, I guess. Just need to get my ass to bed earlier if I'm to give my body the rest it needs.

Inbox: 14, RSS: 14.

#journal #studio

Prendre le large

Il avait été d'abord le fils du missionnaire. Sa grand-mère avait vendu sa fille, vierge de 18 ans, à ce jésuite breton qui en affichait le double au compteur et dont elle-même était secrètement amoureuse. C'était en 1943, une fille était née sous les bombes, une fois même sauvée in extremis par un officier ennemi. Lui était né en France, loin de ce pays qu'on appellerait encore l'Indochine quelque temps. Il avait grandi au milieu des querelles incessantes des 3 femmes.

Le missionnaire avait abandonné ce petit monde et le garçon avait grandi tant bien que mal, sauvage, au milieu d'un capharnaüm de disputes, des amants et de l'indifférence de sa mère à l'égard de sa progéniture — on ne peut lui en vouloir, elle l’avait conçu dans l'ignorance — élevé par une grand-mère pétrie de bigoterie catholique, si bien que pour prendre le large il avait en Mars 1968, le jour de ses 18 ans, signé un engagement dans la marine nationale. Il devait partir en Mai…

Arriva ce qui devait arriver. Plutôt que de répondre à la convocation militaire, il s'installa sur une barricade, apprit très vite le maniement du cocktail incendiaire, perdit sa virginité avec deux pétroleuses enflammées et finit inévitablement, en juin, par être rattrapé par ses obligations, un contrat est un contrat et c'est dans un fourgon de gendarmerie qu'il fit le trajet jusqu'à la base maritime où on s'attela très fermement à faire de lui un brave petit marin national.

La marine ne lui en voulut pas plus que ça. On y trouvait de tout et pas que du meilleur, il faut l'avouer. Il bafouillait assez d'anglais et avait un QI suffisant, on en fit un opérateur radio très compétent qui remplit ses fonctions à la satisfaction générale. Un poste se libérant pour l'assistance des pêches à Terre-Neuve, il se porta volontaire et l'obtint. Acte décisif, car ce qu'il ne savait pas c'est que ce volontariat était valable pour toute autre mission lointaine.

Une avarie immobilisant son bâtiment dans les glaces à son 3^e voyage, il fut expédié directement à Mururoa, à son grand dam, passant en quelques jours d'une température de -40° dans le Labrador à +30 en Polynésie, par la grâce d'un avion aux ailes tremblantes. Il lui fut donné d'assister à divers feux d'artifices mémorables durant les 18 mois passés sur l'atoll, la rareté d'opérateurs volontaires lui ayant fait bénéficier d'une appréciable rallonge de séjour.

On ne pouvait le garder plus longtemps, il bénéficia de larges vacances à Papeete, à ses frais toutefois, mais la marine était généreuse sur les primes dites d'éloignement. Un mois passé dans l'eau et sous le soleil exactement avec une jeune femme à demi chinoise en partance pour les USA afin d'y mener à bien des études de stylisme. C'est alors que sa nouvelle affectation lui fut signifiée : opérateur radio à Saïgon. Le Viet-Nam ! Pays rêvé de son enfance…

Sao Mai, Sao Mai, étoile matinale, fille du Nord, toi aussi tu jouais un jeu dangereux. Le jeune homme, très vite, fut affecté à un jeu autrement plus excitant que celui de transmetteur d'informations, celui de chercher l'Information. La fille du Nord parlait un dialecte qu'il arrivait à comprendre, celui de sa grand-mère, un anglais et un français parfait. Leurs yeux s'étaient croisés, sur le trottoir ils mangeaient face à face des petits pains chinois. Ils avaient le même job.

Il n'y eut jamais mieux entre eux qu'un baiser échangé le dernier jour, la veille du 30 Mai. L'un comme l'autre avaient une trop haute idée de leur devoir. Elle son peuple, lui son contrat. Mais ces heures passées ensemble épaule contre épaule, les mains se cherchant… en d'autres temps ils auraient aimé s'aimer vraiment. Leur futur était déjà écrit et ils devaient s'y résoudre, ces rôles dans un scénario écrit ailleurs mais acceptés les vouaient à une inévitable séparation.

Petite fille du Nord, ton pays tout neuf a su récompenser ton obscur travail et, sans le savoir, ton dévouement jusqu'à l'oubli de tes sentiments intimes. Ton ami en a été heureux lorsque des années plus tard, par la bande, il en a été informé. Toujours il avait craint pour toi de ces représailles qu'on impute facilement aux régimes plus ou moins « populaires ». On ne prête qu'aux riches. Lui, par Bangkok, devait prendre l'avion qui le ramenait à Paris, 2 rue Royale, la DPM.

Une autre vie

Retour morose en France. Permission-retrouvailles avec cette famille qu'il avait fuie. Entre temps des neveux et nièces étaient nés, sa mère s'était installée avec un dernier amant, brave homme, très fier de présenter ce fils d'emprunt dans les cafés du port de la grande ville atlantique, cette ville qu'il n'aimait pas. Il fait impression, « revenir du Vietnam » ça n'est pas rien ici, le petit peuple du Quai de la Fosse culbutant les époques et les guerres dans un rêve tropical d'Indo.

Il a beaucoup changé le gamin parti sept ans auparavant, il a pris des épaules et de l'assurance. On s'étonne de sa phalange manquante, on n'en saura rien, comme d'ailleurs d'autres choses, il raconte peu, ne dit pas tout, les taiseux ça plaît dans ce milieu, même si ça déçoit ça fait viril. Il fréquente les nouveaux restaurants chinois et vietnamiens, plaisantant avec les patronnes dans leur langue. Ça lui vaut la tournée de mei kouei lou et on le surnomme le Chinois.

Enfin il faut rallier le ministère, train de nuit pour Paris, il repart, pas fâché, ça ne l'intéresse pas de traîner son ennui dans la grisaille citadine d'un été chaud et sec, d'être un étranger parmi ces parents qui font pourtant visiblement effort pour ne pas se déchirer en sa présence. Convoqué à Paris et non pas à Brest ou Toulon, ça signifie qu'on ne va pas l'affecter à un quelconque PC radio sur tel ou tel bâtiment avec son 2^e chevron doré tout neuf sur l'épaule. Alors quoi ?

D'abord des cours, théoriques et pratiques, des tests, beaucoup de tests. Il y aura aussi une enquête sur son compte. Il est nécessaire de s'assurer de la fiabilité de ce garçon. On va lui apprendre à utiliser ces toutes nouvelles machines à coder, bien plus sûres que les vieilles. On lui apprend plein de choses. À l'issue de tout cela le voici un matin embarquant dans un grand avion blanc d'Air France à destination de Tokyo, on lui a découvert plein de talents et celui des langues.

Ça aurait pu durer longtemps. Se profila la fin de son contrat, à l'étonnement de ses supérieurs et malgré leur insistance, il ne le renouvela pas, il souhaitait quitter la marine. Son travail, ses primes, sa retraite, au diable, c'est tout. Ça l'avait ébloui, une nuit ou un matin, soudainement. Il s'était bien amusé, neuf années durant, avait vu et appris des choses passionnantes et il en avait assez, tout bêtement, envie d'autre chose qu'il ne savait pas nommer.

Il aurait pu se donner plein de raisons, évoquer de passionnantes rencontres de maîtres d'armes, de moines, d'artistes, de sorcières, telles celles régnant sur cette petit île du sud, seules prêtresses de ce chamanisme à peine apprivoisé par le shinto, mais pas de fausse excuse. Et ça n'était pas lassitude, il aimait bien la vie qu'il menait mais il lui avait semblé qu'il devait y avoir mieux à faire, à construire peut-être. Il rentra en France. Il reviendra.

C'était Novembre, de Roissy à Montparnasse il faisait gris, les Parisiens lui semblaient aussi gris et tristes que le ciel, après Tokyo tout lui semblait sale et sinistre, les rapports humains grossiers, cette vision n'était pas près de le quitter, désormais il aurait l'impression de vivre en pays barbare. On était en 1978, Giscard jouait de l'accordéon à l'Élysée, ne sachant où aller il revint une nouvelle fois au bord de l'Atlantique mais ce fut provisoire.

S'ensuivirent d'autres escapades, pour son propre compte, l'Asie comme horizon. La vie qui passe, comme un voilier, de temps à autre les ports sont accueillants, parfois non. Alors qu'il se résignait à ne jamais plus rencontrer de fée pour enchanter sa vie, le miracle arriva. Miracle est le mot juste tant il était impossible que ces deux-là se rencontrent un jour, décident de finir le voyage ensemble, et y parviennent, accompagnés dans leur chemin par la lumière de belles personnes.

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Vous aimeriez connaître la suite ? En voici quelques épisodes…

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Partir

par Gilles Le Corre

C'est fou le nombre de cachettes qu'on trouve aisément sur un bateau, pour peu qu'on n'ait pas trop d'embonpoint, alors c'est ridiculement facile, surtout de nuit, pour un gamin de treize ans guère nourri qui en paraît dix. Sa première fugue, stoppée avant même le départ du cargo, quelques six mois plus tôt, lui avait permis — mais trop tard — de s'en faire une idée assez précise.

Les Hollandais sont des bons bougres et quand un géant tire le gamin de sa cachette, c'est en riant aux éclats qu'il présente sa prise, peu rassurée quand même, au capitaine. Dans un mélange de hollandais, d'anglais et de français approximatif ce dernier réalise un rapide état des lieux et envoie son nouveau passager aux cuisines, le jugeant, à sa mine, prêt à tomber d'inanition. Le fait est qu'il était bel et bien quasi mort de faim.

Le coq est indonésien et l'enfant ravi retrouve soudain le goût merveilleux du riz de son enfance. Laissé aux soins incompétents de sa grand-mère qui, n'ayant jamais rien fait de sa vie, n'a jamais pu que lui donner un riz collant informe et dégoûtant depuis leur retour en France 8 ans auparavant. Il ne souffre pas du mal de mer, la mer du Nord pourtant ne fera pas de cadeaux, et pendant la semaine précédent sa remise aux autorités compétentes, il se gavera littéralement.

L'équipage, pas loin de vouloir le garder définitivement à bord lui fera des adieux non pas déchirants mais émus à l'escale du Helder.
Tout ce qu'il verra de la Hollande, cette fois, sera un poste de police bien chauffé (on est en automne, le ciel est de plomb) ainsi que ces petits lapins sur la route de nuit dans la camionnette qui l'emmène à la frontière où l'attendra l'accueil beaucoup moins chaleureux de la police française dépêchée en Belgique pour un sinistre retour au bercail.

“Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you If you're young at heart For it's hard, you will find, to be narrow of mind If you're young at heart You can go to extremes with impossible schemes You can laugh when your dreams fall apart at the seams And life gets more exciting with each passing day And love is either in your heart, or on its way Don't you know that it's worth every treasure on Earth To be young at heart For as rich as you are, it's much better by far To be young at heart And if you should survive to 105 Look at all you'll derive out of being alive And here is the best part, you have a head start If you are among the very young at heart And if you should survive to 105 Think of all you'll derive out of being alive And here is the best part, you have a head start If you are among the very young at heart” -Frank Sinatra ——— I've never been a Sinatra fan, but this song holds a place in my being. I grew up chasing fairy tales. My life was anything but, yet I believed. I believed with every inch of my being...I think that just comes with the window of time I was born in.

Life has really tested that belief and damn near dared me to stay “young at heart.” Of all the things that have occurred, it is the past decade that has come closest to canceling out that belief. I have experienced the most physical and emotional pain I've ever experienced in my life during this past decade. Each have certainly left their mark.

At the beginning of this past decade, I stood outside of the castle at Disney World with dusk upon us. No. I sat. I was in a wheelchair. That was a bittersweet pill to swallow. However, it meant I was closer to the castle. Fireworks flared, lights danced up and down the turrets, and tears streamed down my cheeks. It was magical. Memory after memory flickered through my mind. It could have been perfect, but it wasn't. The person I was there with was grumpy at best the entire time. I had a lot of realizations on that trip. One day I will return with the correct person and experience it as it should be.

I had a surgery that made me wish for death every minute I was conscious for almost two weeks following. Time moved very slowly then. I was moving out of my home immediately after that into a place I hadn't realized beforehand was going to push my hyperesthesia to the brink. My waking nightmares glitched hard, and I had to apologize to neighbors for screaming bloody murder in the middle of the night, and explain to ignore me and please don't call the police. That was mortifying. I had my first international trip and held my own at international airports by myself without getting overwhelmed. (A small step for others, but a big leap for me at the time.) I got my heart trampled a few times, my reality shattered, my trust annihilated, I got extremely sick, and I learned what isolation really means. Complete and total isolation minus necessary medical appointments that felt like torture...for years.

I lost weight in a healthy manner until I was as small as or smaller than when I went into the military and felt the best I had felt in decades for a few years, and then I went back online and gained it all back. Plus ten pounds or so.

During all of that and more, I managed to stay young at heart for the most part. Or so I told myself. I think a more accurate description would be that I managed to barricade that part of me away as the survivor inside me rose to the surface. Perhaps “partially rose” would be more accurate. Today's society makes it damn challenging to stay “young at heart” for anyone with half a brain and a smidgen of empathy. Damn challenging.

Once upon a time, I had beliefs. Romantic beliefs. Social beliefs. Professional beliefs. Each got immolated. What bit of innocence I had somehow maintained and carried with me was well and fully scoured away. I could feel myself losing the spirit within that I had been so determined to maintain. I was and have become a shell of my former glory in some ways. In other ways, I've grown stronger.

I now find myself standing at a threshold once more. The young-at-heart believer is peering out of my eyes knowing that all of her dreams are possibly about to come true if she will just believe and glow. The survivor is skeptical, but acknowledges the very real probability. I am tired. More so because I realize just how much I've dampened my me. Reigniting is scary.

Most people no longer believe in fairy tales. The thing is, fairy tales were never kind. They were horror stories. You survived them or you didn't. Both results came with extreme life lessons. Life lessons have a way of turning people bitter. Bitter is something I refuse to be. Cynical? Absolutely. A smartass? You betcha! Young at heart? I really hope so.

At this moment, I am frozen. I understand what's possibly happening, and exactly what that means. I am hopeful, but hope is a frightening thing. The world tends to prefer making hopeful things go splat. The upside of going splat is covering everything in your zany belief cooties until all dour hesitation and grumbly gristle-gummers are floating towards clouds of optimism as if someone shoved a helium balloon up their backside. (Please don't do that.)

I suppose it is time to tune my belief back where it belongs. How many flickers does it take to get to the center of a...Oh! There I am...

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