Home

For most of my life, I thought home was a place.

An address.

A key.

A room where your things stayed when you weren't there.

A place you could leave in the morning with some reasonable expectation that it would still belong to you when you returned.

I learned early that this was not always true.

But there was one exception.

From the beginning, wherever we were, home was my little brother, Aaron.

I was nine years old when everything I owned fit inside a yellow suitcase.

I remember waiting for my mother to come back.

I remember the telephone.

I remember learning that she wasn't coming.

There are sentences a child hears that do more than deliver information.

They rearrange the architecture.

After that, I became very good at carrying home with me.

Sometimes home was a book.

Sometimes it was a small nook between two closets, with a desk and enough quiet to disappear into another world.

Sometimes it was simply knowing where my belongings were.

Sometimes it was being useful enough to earn my place.

And sometimes home was nothing more than the knowledge that I could survive without one.

I didn't know then that survival could become a kind of architecture too.

You build walls.

You learn which doors to lock.

You stop leaving too much of yourself in places that might disappear.

You learn to travel light, even when you aren't going anywhere.

And eventually you can become so good at surviving uncertainty that permanence itself feels suspicious.

But something has been changing.

Quietly.

I have spent much of the last year thinking I was grieving my brother.

And I was.

I still am.

But grief has strange hands.

It reaches into places you weren't looking.

It moves furniture.

Opens closets.

Finds old boxes.

It shows you things you thought you had already dealt with and asks, gently or otherwise:

Are you sure?

Somewhere in that excavation, I began to understand that I wasn't trying to get back to the person I had been before grief.

I was becoming someone I had never been before.

Someone who could stay.

Someone who could receive.

Someone who did not have to mistake uncertainty for freedom.

Someone who could want something without being destroyed if he didn't get it.

And then a house appeared.

Not a mansion.

Not some spectacular reward at the end of a carefully written testimony.

Just a house.

A house with an extra bedroom.

An attached garage.

A fenced yard.

Enough grass that I immediately began imagining how much farther I might extend the fence so Mo could run.

Ordinary things.

Beautifully ordinary things.

I made an offer.

They countered.

I considered it.

And somewhere during all of that, I noticed something about myself.

I was willing to walk away.

Not because I didn't want the house.

I did.

But I no longer needed a particular place to prove that I had finally arrived somewhere.

That may be the strangest thing about home.

Perhaps you cannot really choose one until you know you will still be yourself if the door never opens.

My offer was accepted.

There are inspections still to come. Papers to sign. Numbers to settle. Life has taught me enough not to confuse a possibility with a promise.

So I am not standing on the porch yet.

I do not have the key.

But for the first time, I can see the door.

And I find myself thinking about that nine-year-old boy with the yellow suitcase.

I wish I could sit beside him for a moment.

I wouldn't tell him everything that is going to happen.

Some things a child shouldn't have to carry before their time.

I wouldn't tell him that everything will be easy.

It won't.

I wouldn't even tell him that one day he will own a house.

Because I know something now that he couldn't possibly have understood then.

I would tell him:

Home is not the place that never lets you down.

Home is not the place you never have to leave.

Home is not even the place where all your things are kept.

Home is what begins to appear when you no longer have to abandon yourself in order to belong somewhere.

And maybe that is why this house means something to me before I have ever spent a night inside it.

I thought I was buying walls.

A roof.

A yard.

A little patch of ground.

But perhaps I am standing at the far end of a journey that began with a yellow suitcase.

A boy learned that home could disappear.

A man learned that he could survive without it.

And somewhere along the way, survival became something else.

It became peace.

It became choice.

It became the ability to stay.

Maybe soon, it will become an address.

But home?

I think I have been building that for a long time.

#ArchitectureOfGrief

© SilentSentinel, 2026. All rights reserved. Excerpts may be shared with attribution.

While reading my morning newsletters, I came across a GitHub repository called Token Monitor. The repository, which has more than 2,000 stars, hosts an application that tracks tokens and cost from dozens of AI subscriptions and tools. It also has a nice menu bar icon on macOS. Given all the issues with today's vibe-coding app landscape and recent security headlines, I was a little wary of blindly installing the application from its repository.

Enter Fable. As I'm sure many are aware, Fable is the public version of Anthropic's Mythos model which has extra guardrails that prevent it from becoming an overpowered hacking tool. Further, Fable 5.1 can discover software vulnerabilities, though not to develop exploits for them. I have a Claude subscription with access to the Fable model.

Because Token Monitor’s source code was in a public repository, asking Fable to scan the code for any vulnerabilities or malware was trivial. Fable gave the source for the most recent release a clean bill of health and I felt much better about installing the application on my system.

For those who may be in a similar situation, this is a straightforward path for some peace of mind.

J’ai perdu tout le monde pour te trouver, toi.

Je ne l’avais pourtant pas décidé. Je n’avais tracé aucun chemin, prononcé aucun serment, dressé aucune liste de ceux qu’il faudrait quitter. J’avançais seulement avec cette étrange impossibilité de rester là où quelque chose en moi devait se taire pour être aimé.

Alors je suis parti.

Parfois avec fracas. Le plus souvent en silence. J’ai quitté des tables où l’on riait sans jamais se rencontrer. Des amitiés qui savaient tout de mes habitudes et presque rien de mon âme. Des bras qui me retenaient sans parvenir à m’atteindre. J’ai abandonné des places que beaucoup auraient appelées confortables, simplement parce que je m’y sentais absent de ma propre vie.

Ils m’ont cru asocial.

Ils ont pris mon retrait pour du mépris, mon exigence pour de l’orgueil, ma fatigue pour de l’indifférence. Ils pensaient que je ne savais pas aimer les gens, que je demandais trop, que je cherchais une perfection qui n’existait pas. Ils me voyaient perdre les uns après les autres et se disaient que le problème devait forcément venir de celui qui demeurait seul.

Ce qu’ils ignoraient, c’est qu’au fond de chaque conversation, j’écoutais si ta voix allait apparaître.

Dans chaque regard, je cherchais cette façon que tu aurais un jour de me voir sans m’enfermer. Dans chaque présence, je guettais celle auprès de laquelle je n’aurais plus besoin de choisir entre être compris et rester entier. Je ne connaissais ni ton visage, ni ton nom, ni la forme de tes mains. Je connaissais seulement la place exacte que ton absence avait creusée en moi.

Et cette place ne ressemblait à personne d’autre.

Je pouvais être entouré et sentir que tu manquais. Je pouvais rire, parler, séduire, appartenir en apparence au mouvement du monde, puis rentrer avec cette certitude muette que je n’avais encore rencontré personne auprès de qui ma solitude accepterait enfin de se reposer.

Je ne fuyais donc pas les autres. Je refusais seulement de leur demander de devenir toi.

Je refusais aussi de les garder comme des remparts contre le vide. Il aurait été facile d’accumuler les présences, de remplir les soirées, de confondre le nombre avec la proximité. Mais quelque chose en moi savait que la foule n’abolit pas l’absence. Elle peut même la rendre plus visible. Car il n’existe pas de solitude plus nette que celle qui nous saisit au milieu de ceux auprès de qui nous devrions nous sentir chez nous.

Alors j’ai continué.

J’ai accepté les portes qui se fermaient. Les jugements. Les malentendus. Les longues saisons durant lesquelles ma vie semblait se vider au lieu de s’accomplir. Je ne dirai pas que toutes ces pertes étaient nécessaires. Certaines furent absurdes. D’autres cruelles. Quelques unes auraient peut être pu être évitées. Mais chaque fois que je refusais de me trahir pour retenir quelqu’un, je préservais sans le savoir l’homme qui devait un jour te reconnaître.

Puis tu es arrivée.

Tu n’as pas comblé le vide. Tu lui as donné raison.

Soudain, tout ce que l’on avait pris pour une incapacité à aimer révélait sa véritable nature. Je n’étais pas fermé. J’étais en attente. Je n’étais pas incapable de proximité. J’étais incapable de contrefaçon. Je n’avais pas renoncé aux êtres. J’espérais simplement une présence devant laquelle je n’aurais plus besoin de disparaître pour ne pas être abandonné.

Tu n’as pas effacé ceux que j’ai perdus. Tu n’as pas transformé chaque blessure en étape providentielle. Tu as fait quelque chose de plus vrai. Tu as donné une direction à tout ce qui, jusque là, n’avait eu que l’apparence du manque.

Ils comptaient les absents.

Moi, sans le savoir, je réduisais la distance entre nous.

Ils regardaient les chaises vides autour de moi. Ils ne voyaient pas que je gardais une place intacte. Ils croyaient que je m’éloignais de la vie, alors que je marchais vers le seul endroit où je pourrais enfin y entrer tout entier.

Et maintenant que je te vois, je comprends que je n’ai jamais fui le monde.

Je l’ai traversé jusqu’à toi.

O poder da voz. Faz um mês que partiste. Não há um dia que não acorde e não adormeça com vontade de te ver. Não poder te ligar para te contar o meu dia dói, ouço as tuas mensagens vezes e vezes sem conta, o sentimento que nasce é complexo, sinto o amor mas com ele a saudade cresce. Começo a perceber que essa saudade vai sempre aumentar por isso prefiro te ouvir, pois poder sentir um pouco de ti vivo vale suportar a lembrança da tua ausência. Hoje te estaria a ligar a contar como foi o retorno dele à escola, a contar todas as alegrias, todas as revoltas. Te conto igual. Naquele momento nosso antes de adormecer ou de manhã quando caminho para poder te ver. Obrigada por todas as mensagens que tenho tuas, obrigada por todas as fotos e todos os videos, obrigada por nos fazeres sentir sempre tão amados mesmo quando já não te posso abraçar. Quero que saibas que temos estado bem, temos estado a tentar fazer o melhor como sempre ensinaste, e estamos a seguir em frente mesmo que a vontade seja de passar várias horas nas memórias de quando te tinha aqui. Vou ouvir-te mais um pouco e no meio da saudade celebrar a tua vida, celebrar a pessoa maravilhosa e única que foste, tu meu primeiro eterno amor.

Another week, another of Jenny Erpenbeck’s books: Visitation, this time. I finished it yesterday. First published in 2008, it’s counted as her first novel, though at only 150 pages it could probably also be considered her third novella. While relatively brief, it does not lack heft and depth. It’s about a plot of land by a lake in countryside not far from Berlin, and the house built on it; and about the house’s various inhabitants and some of their near neighbours. Initially a weekend retreat for a successful architect in the early ‘30s, the place goes on to be buffeted by powerful historical crosswinds which leave practically no-one connected with it unscathed — though some suffer much worse fates than others. A connecting thread through the book is the figure of an unnamed gardener who tends the grounds and watches over the house for the majority of its existence, thereby neatly contrasting the disruptive dramas of history with the continuities of nature.

The writing is refined and artful, with the style often changing from chapter to chapter. One early section, for example, incorporates folklore; another, near the end, folds in a measure of legalese. In between, repetition is employed to a number of different ends: to foreshadow, to destabilise, to underscore, and so on. From the simple pleasures of leisurely country living to the terrible cruelties of mass murder, it’s a book that covers a lot of ground in its short span. Comparing it with her later novel Go Went Gone, I found it similarly powerful and affecting, albeit achieving its effects by very different means.

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On Sunday I played host to my sister, her husband, and Bertie, their new puppy (Fig. 38). My cooking didn’t all quite go to plan: some mishaps meant that the main course came to table in two instalments rather than all at once. Flavour-wise at least it was successful enough. And the cheeseboard was well-received. Bertie, a Bedlington/Jack Russell cross (Fig. 39) mostly behaved himself, although his incomplete house-training wasn’t quite equal to the challenge of spending a few hours in an unfamiliar environment.

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At Monmouth on Friday (I took last week off work) I picked up a couple of second-hand CDs with a Cuban connection. There was more Mongo Santamaria with a compilation disc called Skins combining two of his ‘60s albums for the Riverside label: Go, Mongo! (‘62) and Mongo Explodes (‘66). My preference is for the latter with its better-integrated blend of North American jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms: for a flavour of it, try ‘Dirty Willie’.

And there was The Blessing (1991), by Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, more than ably assisted by Charlie Haden on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. I’d not previously heard of this remarkably impressive musician. The record begins with some agitated rapid-fire solo piano before the bass & drums come in. And there is plenty more steely virtuosity to follow, expertly blended with more tender & soulful playing, as in his take on ‘Besame Mucho’, for example.

My father had a love of carpentry. Cabinets, bookshelves, tables, chests — it didn’t matter. If it involved woodworking, he was interested. He was very keen on getting quality cuts of wood and the best finishing he could afford. He often said, “No amount of varnish ever fixed a rotten board.” And his Depression-era truth still stands today.

But this kind of truth is only helpful if you also know the distinction between a good and a rotten board. You’d have to know that, characteristically, rotten wood isn’t all the same, as its discoloration can vary widely. It can appear cracked, warped, shrunk, or peeling. It can give off a musty, earthy, mushroom-like odor and, when tapped, sound dull or hollow rather than dense or solid. And it may or may not have visible mold or fungal growth.

Finding a good board to work with can be a challenge if you don’t know what to look for. And even as simple as that sounds, even a keen eye can sometimes be deceived. We may sometimes mistake a board’s unique qualities of age, stress, or wear for something rotten, when really they’re just blemishes reflecting the board’s circumstances, but not its substance.

People are, by nature, more complex than wooden boards, and telling the difference between good and bad (rotten) character isn’t always easy. I don’t profess to be any kind of expert either. I have been deceived and misled many times. And that’s not simply the fault of the other person. It is also mine, and my own ignorance or naivety or carelessness that allowed me to be taken in by appearances easily in a world of people who often are never on the outside who they appear on the inside.

Culture, too, plays a role here—especially popular culture—which, whether deliberately or accidentally, serves as a tool of acculturation: a means of setting norms and expectations for people, regardless of how accurate or true-to-life those norms and expectations really are. And mass media, along with social interaction, are critical to that acculturation.

Popular culture through media, especially through visual and social media, circulates not what someone needs, but what captures attention. It offers spectacle. And when people consume the shallowness of spectacle, we sometimes also trade our own natural curiosity and need for critical reasoning because the image of a norm or standard they are offered is easier to consume than having to investigate for ourselves. And when we surrender our faculties, no matter how developed they may be, we trade our own natural needs and desires for the projection. In so doing, the projection, then, becomes a mirror.

There are consequences for this. Ideals shaped by an environment like ours that optimizes for attention, comfort, and immediate pleasure capture and imprison our minds. There’s no care there for the well-being of the person consuming it, mimicking it, or living it. And in our consumption of these norms and standards, however nice and attractive they may appear, we also consume the rot within them, smuggled in right before our very eyes. Yet, generation after generation, people keep looking past the catastrophes of these manufactured projections and revere them as the greatest examples of good living — enviable and thus worthy of imitation.

Having wants and desires isn’t the problem. That is part of the human condition. The problem is the source of the desire. There are some desires that are manufactured for us, not to help us with our basic needs or live better lives, but to convince us that an unrealistic external ideal is implicitly better than whatever our own experiences have shown us or proven.

Conversely, those desires grown from experience with and in the world rather than through media are better suited to guiding us to a better life and contentment since they’ve been tested by encounters and revised by missteps and failure. Those experiences are the best teachers because they show us how no amount of varnish can fix or fully hide the rot inside. At some point, the truth comes out.

We see this when we misplace our faith and trust in appearances rather than character, and later invariably experience: Disappointment. Anger. Insecurity. Cognitive dissonance. Exhaustion. Worry. Fear. The hollowness of someone who should be there but isn’t. Masks, however clever, can never fully hide the rot that lies beneath. And the contractions are more than just inconveniences; they’re toxic realities — hard and painful — that no mask, however joyful and pleasurable, can compensate.

The rot beneath the beauty doesn’t care about you, your desires, or your well-being, no matter the layers of varnish.

#Excultio

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

I am very aware of my n00bness. But, let’s try anyway? Follow for Zen/witchy/pop culture/mind wanderings of a 38-year-old woman living somewhere near the equator.

#helloworld #fediverse

In the early 1980s, while working for ETA Systems, I got picked to be our representative to Control Data (our parent company)’s working group on AI. At the time, it was all Lisp and Scheme-based “expert systems,” and my assessment was that the hard part was teaching the systems and the danger of the system making connections that were not factually-based, but which sounded very plausible.

I never really got any deep understanding, as I saw it as an intractable problem, for a number of reasons, not least of which was liability. “If you build an expert system, and it mis-diagnoses someone’s cancer and they die, are you prepared for the reputation hit, and the years of lawsuits?” The systems of the time could still suggest interesting avenues for research, but it would take a human to do the research and see if the machine’s suggestion has any basis in reality, or was just a case of correlation without causation.

This was not seen as a productive direction, as most researchers had plenty of bad ideas, and having a computer generate even more bad ideas just added noise without adding signal. Plus Control Data started having financial problems, so the whole thing was dropped. “Any useful results are still a couple decades off, and we don’t have the resources to spare for this research today.” It reminded me of the people saying that fusion power was going to save us; it’s just another decade of research away (still is, four decades later).

At the same time, a friend was playing with Markov Chain text generators to make plausible sounding “lorem ipsum” text. The results were interesting, and plausible-sounding (just like today’s LLMs), but there was no fact-checking. It was a fun toy for distracting the computer-naïve though, much like Eliza.

Today, we have much bigger models, so the text is even more plausible sounding, but still without fact-checking. And we have the companies run by greedheads who don’t care about whether the LLM is right as long as they’re making money, and shrug off any liability, but the warning from IBM in 1979 is every bit as true today as it was then. “A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.”

Anyway, I’m thinking it’s another case of a waste of research money, but with the greedheads wasting much more money, energy, and resources than would have been possible in the Reagan years. And we’ve got LLMs polluting the web with their slop, so a guy can’t even find out easily that there’s no such thing as alcohol-free port without having to wade through dozens of pages of slop.

Sigh.

The reading material arrived in my inbox on a Wednesday, five days before the workshop was due to start.

It was from a 2016 book: “Applied Theatre: Facilitation Pedagogies, Practices, Resilience”, by Sheila Preston. Chapter 1 presented a case study where:

a member of a mental health institution expressed his disquiet at the idea that other members of the group were happy to perform, in public, a play about the experience of mental illness. He felt uncomfortable with the association and that they would be representing “him”.

Indeed, any intervention – which may sometimes be a facilitated workshop, or a staged theatre production – may run the risk of reproducing dominant narratives, leading to anxiety and sensitivity among the disenfranchised.

What then is the role of a facilitator in this social and cultural system that surrounds the facilitator on all sides – whether at the family dinner table, or at the workplace desk, or during the morning commute?

I attended a workshop to find out – it lasted fourteen hours over two days, 10 AM to 5 PM each day.

The host, H.L., was candid about the setting of the workshop: “Workshops are romantic. They allows participants to meander on topics. After the workshop ends, the participants – and their accumulated know-how – are tested by the reality that awaits them outside of the workshop venue.”

The books referenced in this workshop did not make for light reading:

1. “Theater of the oppressed”, a book by Augusto Boal (a Brazilian).
2. “Pedagogy of the oppressed”, a book by Paulo Freire (another Brazilian).
3. “Games for Actors and Non-Actors”, by the same Boal.

Time does not suffice to elucidate the proceedings of the workshop in detail. Nonetheless I attempt a sketch.

The participants numbered about thirty. Most appeared to be in mid-career, whether as a facilitator of workshops within a large, top-down organisation, or as a founder of a small enterprise.

H.L. started the workshop by inviting participants to set the rules of engagement.

Two participants collaboratively volunteered the first rule: “Hold space for each other's choices”.

Another rule was volunteered: “have fun”.

As a group of strangers coming together for the first time, this first activity served as scaffolding for the next seven hours of the first day.

H.L. introduced the “banking” concept of education (from Freire's book) where students are seen as docile cabinets that store the knowledge that trickle down from the teachers' authority-position; think: large imposing teacher's desk in the classroom, and quite possibly a punitive device, such as a rattan cane.

But H.L. draws from Freire's idea of the problem-posing method: here is a problem that has emerged; how shall we solve it together? This dissolves the dichotomy between teacher and student. In Freire's words (as translated by Myra Bergman Ramos):

“He [the teacher-student] does not regard cognizable objects as his private property, but as the object of reflection by himself and the students. In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students – no longer docile listeners – are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers his earlier considerations as the students express their own. The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos.”

H.L. has his own spin on this afore-mentioned “re-considering of earlier considerations” – he coins the term: Negation Of Negation. (A heady brew of words, for sure).

In other words, the facilitator considers the downsides of the participants' choices, and then performs an intellectual leap to re-consider his own thoughts about the supposed down-sides – what if I go along with the participants' choices? What choices would be lost? What would be gained?

This idea could certainly be lost in a stew of cerebral-sounding words that ring hollow for participants and clients of the facilitator, so H.L. has provided a role model during this workshop, by having all 30 of us engage in activities that involved our physical bodies. These were games titled: “Take my name”, and “Sword and shield”.

“Learning involves the body and the emotions,” H.L. observed.

After the games, we sat down and formed a pair to discuss what happened during the game. This was particularly insightful as every one of us (30 pax) had brought a refreshing perspective based on our differing professional experiences: for example, one was a theatre performer, while another was a social worker.

According to H.L., the praxis of building possibilities together in such a teacher-student collective exploration, comes from (a) action and then, (b) reflection.

There was certainly plenty of time for games, and plenty of time to reflect on how the game illuminated these aspects:

1. What did I notice about me as a person?
2. What did I notice about Facilitation?
3. What did I notice about myself as a facilitator?

In retrospect, I realise that the game serves as the problem-posing method. What happened in the game just now? How can we play better the next time?

This brings me back to the topic of this workshop, Critical Facilitation. Such a process of Critical Facilitation serves a dual purpose: (a) identifying the forces at play, in a oppressive dynamic – for example, to consider a dynamic between an alcoholic father, and his worker-children who toil away in sweatshops to send him money to feed his alcoholic addiction: there may be a toxic dependence on each other, and that is why the children are reluctant to leave: they rely on any crumbs of affection from the father, while the father is unable to find a job due to an economy that prioritises cheaper labour from women, and then he feels useless, and then he drinks to numb his pain.

A workshop setting (hopefully) allows the disenfranchised to build the world they live in, giving a voice to tensions that exist in this situation but which may have gone unheard in the outside-workshop setting. H.L. quotes Thomas Hardy here: “The caller always calls but is not heeded. That is why love falls through.”

Question: can the caller be heeded in a facilitated workshop?

But such a singular purpose is not enough. Critical Facilitation serves the second purpose of (b) imparting skills so that participants can make change after the workshop, as they return to their communities, in the hopes that they themselves can participate in such change.

A question for myself: what kind of skill might be useful to an adult child of an alcoholic father?

I think, perhaps that might look like instilling a greater sense of confidence in that individual's own gut feeling and intuition, which may likely have been buried under the shame of having been abused verbally and physically by the addict-father.

But, in the spirit of curiosity, and to apply Negation Of Negation, perhaps my above-ventured intervention could run the risk of being repulsively prescriptive – perhaps a facilitator could more skillfully serve the adult child by being asking what he, or she, wants – what she (i.e. the adult child) finds helpful and what she finds unhelpful.

However H.L. sounds a caution for any would-be facilitator, by quoting a Jewish proverb: “When humans plan, God laughs.”

This corresponds with the Biblical Book of Proverbs, chapter 19, verse 21: “Many are the plans in a person's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails.”

At this point, I want to end this short reflection by listing the questions that H.L. has invited us to carry out of the workshop venue:

1. What did this space just admit?
2. What limits us here?
3. What will you bring into your space of practice?

Thank you for reading.

#acting

Locks click twice now, force of habit, even when nobody's coming up the stairs.

I tell the mirror I'm fine before it has time to ask, get dressed in a hurry so it doesn't catch me still.

Face turns toward the window whenever footsteps slow outside, I count them past the door, exhale when they keep going.

Everyone who gets close eventually hears it, my voice going flat and careful, like I'm reading it off a card.

I still leave the second cup on the drying rack, though nobody here has needed it in months.

Sultry noon curdles into grey by four most days, the kind of sky that can't commit to one mood either.

A knock comes sometimes. I count to ten before I move, like the door might forget I'm home if I wait long enough.

Barometer dropping in my chest before it drops outside, I feel the storm coming before the weatherman does.

I want the rain and the closing door to be different things, one leaves a rainbow I never catch in time, the other leaves nothing.

Tuesday the sun broke through for maybe six minutes, I stood in the kitchen and let it hit the back of my neck.

Cup's still on the rack. I rinse it anyway most mornings, not sure yet if that's habit or something closer to hope.

Hoping the next knock finds the door already open, not promising I'll get there. Just hoping I'm learning how.

• diimaan (08/09/2026)

People's MOTIVES and some dynamics in RELATIONSHIPS

The BRAIN can read a current person as a threat based on past experiences and relationships. It can recognize the behaviors of individuals that were acting with malice and forethought and identifying some current people as THE SAME. However, it does not always mean the current person acting this way has THE SAME malice and forethought as that past person or other past people did.

It is just so TOUGH nowadays with any relationships because people are seeming to only be motivated out of self-interest. That many just DO NOT CARE about other people, only what they can get out of other people.

Statements I've heard such as: “I'd like to be his (Corey Taylor's) ex-wife some day” have this type of materialistic ideology. Even said jokingly (if it was) shows me that many ARE just self-interested. That their idea of “happiness” lies in material wealth and goods.

A HUGE DISTINCTION: some may act 100% one-sided, but it's SO NOT INTENTIONAL. I made the mistake of treating these situations as other past toxic situations but one thing I left out: THERE IS A LEARNING PROBLEM involved that produces this behavior. It matches up all one-sided but again it is SO UNINTENTIONAL. That's the difference!

These situations cannot work either way, though. There is a recognition of the behavior, but it still makes the dynamic unworkable. I need to be heard too, and other people that are participating need to recognize that. It cannot work if the dynamic is always one-sided. People need reciprocity. Some are just incapable of it, even though their intentions are essentionally good.

A week ago, esx.ie was quietly configured as the short-link domain for the Essayism family: essayism.org, essayism.ie, essay.ie, esy.ie, essayist.ie and so forth.

The logic seemed perfectly obvious. They all begin with es; x is an agreeable little code-letter for everything that follows. Neat, compact, almost self-explanatory.

Then, without announcement, promotion, or meaningful use – apart from a default error page and one modest footer appearance – esx.ie received 177 clicks.

This raises several possibilities. Perhaps people are intuitively drawn to concise domains. Perhaps the internet has developed a taste for unexplained initials. Or perhaps 177 accidental visitors were simply looking for somewhere called “Essex” and took a poetic wrong turn.

Whatever the reason, esx.ie has made its first small, mysterious entrance. It appears that even a link can have a life before it has a purpose.

For a micro-second I pondered

Ah. Of course. :–)

The 177 clicks may not have been a spontaneous celebration of elegant URL architecture after all. They were probably seekers of sex.ie whose fingers, morals, or browser autocomplete took a slight turn toward Essayism.

Which is rather wonderful: a short-link domain devised as an efficient code for a family of essays, accidentally masquerading as Ireland’s most optimistic typo.

“Essayism begins where expectation ends.”

David Marshall Skerries