It’s the hiding behind being “busy” that drives me completely insane.

Everyone knows the truth:

nobody is ever too busy to send a five-second text to someone who actually matters to them. People make time for what they prioritize. Period.

When you use “busy” as an umbrella excuse, it feels like a total lack of respect for my intelligence and my time. It’s a cowardly way to avoid an uncomfortable, adult conversation.

What I’m asking for isn't dramatic, needy, or unreasonable. It’s just basic emotional maturity:

• If your feelings shifted, just say it. • If you don't have the capacity to engage right now, just own it.

Give me the truth so I can process it, adapt, and move on with my life; don't keep me hanging in ambiguity just to save yourself from a moment of awkwardness.

Your silence and your “busy” excuses are telling me everything you’re too afraid to say out loud. You don't have the courage to offer me direct honesty, so you're just letting this starve on the vine instead.

I've been trying to let the noise quieten, and to walk away from everyday writing. To listen, but need not pick up pen. To ignore the outpouring again and again.

It can't be understated—this urge. It more a habit where thoughts and conscious converge. At the very least, it's an organizing boss. But are the orders worth scribing? Should I void them as loss?

We can't scurry forward if stuck in a rut. Mayhaps, I should merely journal. I think I'd enjoy that, but...

It's more an excuse to still scribble absurdly. To give rhyme to reason and alliterate demurely. I almost changed that end. Let's do it with rhythm instead, and pretend.

I've been trying to let the noise quieten. I just can't decide if it's to lighten or frighten. Perhaps it does both, or neither at all. The words are still there. I've just built them a wall.

...

Ever the ongoing theme with me. Ever the ongoing theme.

On a side note: I now have an ice machine that makes pebbled ice! If a reader has been to Sonic before, it's that kind of ice! I'm utterly ecstatic! Maybe I should write a poem about my adventures with ice. I'm not going to. The onomonopia possibility does humor me.

The last two days I've dreamed of my cats. These days they tend to only show up in my dreams when I need comfort. I'm pretty sure I don't need comfort. One showed up sleeping with me as she always did, but it then turned into her needing fed. Two kittens I didn't recognize showed up as well. Someone I know placed the food I was feeding them into spaghetti, and then gave them the spaghetti. Needless to say, I blew a gasket. I barely managed to stop a kitten from choking. I woke up absolutely infuriated.

Last night, part of my dream involved my more reclusive beauty. She was the first to pass, and she rarely shows up in dreams. We were in a small car. I was taking us somewhere, nervous about getting over my head in traffic. We ended up having to carefully turn around because the road we was on ended up flooded in a lake as far as they eye could see. We backtracked, had to crawl through an over-filled van, and the last I remember she was snuggled against me in my bed where she used to lay. My eyes tear up thinking about it. It's some fifteen years since she passed.

I wonder if I will dream of the other tonight. I miss them. Very much so. I am guessing that I always will. I look forward to when I'm in such a place where I can once again have a little purrball glued to my side, but in an independent way, of course.

I certainly wouldn't feed them spaghetti! Cats are obligate carnivores. Stop pretending otherwise for convenience. Ugggh!

Written August 5, 2026. © 2026 AnOublietteofThought.

JOURNAL 5 août 2026

Alors nous voici en direct d'une espèce d´izakaya locale, repère des surfeurs de la plage. Ils ont fini par nous draguer gentiment légèrement

« Olala on vous voit souvent ici, vous nagez drôlement bien, vous savez prendre les vagues, Vous surfez ? Vous devriez Vous habitez où ? Ah c’est c'est pas loin Vous travaillez où ? Olala une sensei Olala c'est pas possible vous travaillez pour le gouvernement, mais comment ça se fait ? Vous parlez drôlement bien on croirait une japonaise Ah vous vivez ensemble .................. Ah vous êtes mariées .................. .................. ..................vous êtes drôlement sympa, venez on va vous montrer notre quartier général. »

Le fait est, c'est plus sympa que l'hôtel moche. Et nous voilà devant des bières, tout le monde veut nous offrir à boire, On n’a pas fini. Ils sont gentils avec leurs cheveux décolorés et leur allure de collégiens. Ça faisait un moment qu’ils nous reluquaient, surtout quand on était à poil, évidemment, ils nous le disent naïvement. Ils admirent notre décontraction, évidemment le style français c’est plus cool que le japonais. Allez, la nuit commence…

While reflecting on voice recently, I found myself arriving at an unexpected conclusion. The question was not where my voice came from, but where it should go. Over the years my writing has gradually organised itself into distinct territories. Marshall on Policy deals with policy. The Marshall Review provides a home for commentary and reflection. Marshall on Essays explores essaying itself. My music sites have their own purposes and audiences.

These boundaries are useful. They help readers find what interests them and avoid what doesn't. We do not read newspapers from cover to cover; we navigate them by habit and interest. Websites are no different.

Yet life continually presents things that sit beyond such categories. A queue. A speed bump. A campervan parked outside the house. An overheard remark. An assumption nobody seems to question. A small irritation that turns out to reveal something larger.

These things rarely justify an essay. They are often too slight for policy and too personal for review. Yet they are frequently where thought begins. That realisation has led to the creation of INQ. Unlike my other sites, INQ is not organised around a subject. It is organised around attention. The working strapline is:

INQ.ie Marshall on Things.

It is a place for observations, questions, curiosities, irritations and occasional convictions. A place where the subject need not justify itself before it is allowed onto the page. Perhaps the simplest way of putting it is this: INQ is where I intend to write in my own voice, unboxed.

Not recklessly. Not carelessly. But without feeling obliged to fit every thought into a pre-existing category or publication. If Marshall on Policy asks what should be done, and The Marshall Review asks what should be made of something, INQ asks a simpler question:

What's going on here?

The answer may sometimes turn into an essay. It may occasionally become a policy piece. More often it will remain simply an observation. And that is enough. As a reminder to myself, should I ever become too polite, too cautious, or too eager to self-censor: Speak up, man.

And, oh yeah, it's pronounced ink.

Images are the reminders of the mortar that bind our lives.

It was always a dream of mine (and still is) to travel. And I mean travel as in get lost in places I never thought I’d go. Faraway places that people have to get map to find.

Quiet, forgotten places. They, like any small beautiful thing, will have their own unique beauty. And if no one else has seen it, all the better. It’s still amazing. And I find that irresistible.

---

A continuation of Dear Diary #61 – where upon i pontificate and put my hand upon the things behind.

The one about traveling more.

12:00am

Looking for photos of some places and ran across shots from 1997... three people who I would watch grow from tiny humans to real adults. They've changed and become amazing. Some failures, many successes. And I look in their eyes and think how they must have looked up to me all those years ago and formany years tocome.

Thenk something would break. And everything changed. andd now I think... one's eyes would burn with anger, a second with indifference – having largely forgotten me... and the third... the third, I think perhaps she would see me and I would recognize disappointment and sadness, but understanding and compassion.

And for that small gift... I thank God. For that kind of love is hard to find.

And I see other photos of a life lived robustly and wonder how I landed here in Dust Meridian, in teh middle of the night with tears in my eyes, wondering if everythign is gonna be alright.

I don't mind the scars, honestly. I have so many. We all do. I'll bet your scars make you in to teh person you are too. Would you trade them? Some, maybe. But mostly, who want's to forget who they are? Give up the life they've built, the loves and achievements. The goodness that flows from them?

No, the scars are okay. It's the raw wounds that I think both can agree we'd rather do without.

I brok my left leg when I was seven. Tibia and fibia. I was jumping on the bed in the upstairs of my parents house when she got jealous of my superior jumping skills (obviously) and pushed me into open air at the zenith of my jump.

Crack.

It was miserable. Even now I cannot stand the sound (real or fake) of breaking bones. There's nothing like it.

But I want thememory. The blue walls, the carpet that reminded me of a topographical map. The slanted ceiling. HOw my mom carried me to the car. All of it.

it's almst as if the worse the pain, the better the memory.

Holy hell, if that's the case, I'm working on a fucking doozy.

I miss random Saturday's like this. Just a bunch of friends together doing something nice for other people. Nobody getting paid. Everyone happy and suffering doing something kind.

That seems to have been washed away. A closed chapter in a book the I need to take down off theshelf more often.

But don't we ALL need to take our books off theshelf more, both figuratively and and literal?

I don't care how good 'real' art is, I think my books might be the greatest thing I ever create.

I am currently finishishing 69 and 72. When I travel, my only real goal is to fill them with as much expericne as I can possibly manage. Even if no one ever reads them. They are priceless treasures and I wish more people understood the value of recording the mortar of their lives.

One thing about pain, nothing assuades it like kindesses for others. I'll be glad to wrap my project this week and find soemting good to do for soemone else for a little bit.

The mistake we make is that we can't wait to find the the person that's already in us. And if we do, and the timing is all wrong. Thank God if you can just be in their lives for thirty years. You don't need to own someone to love them deeply. But if you'r enot careful, you'll get greedy and ruin it all.

Just let them be the twinkle in the night's sky. Only astronauts can go to space. The rest of us worms are doing just fine right were we are.

---

If you are in one these 10k+ images, thank you. I love you. If you aren't, maybe one day you will be.

---

If you read this far, you deserve a reward. God I miss this, just opening up the valve and letting it flow. I can't do that the way I used to. Every time my keys clack, eyebrows go up in my vicinity.

I suppose I deserve that. The scrutiny. Falling in love is a powerful thing

But, public forums being what they are, I'll maintain some modicum of reserve here.

---

When on the continent, I HIGHLY recommend shopping with the locals. Hand dyed, cut and sewn. Be warned though, we're all a lot fatter than the rest of the world.

jericah

We're so coddled here in the west. In places like this, there was every opportunity to fall to your death. Or drown. Or get picked off by bandits.

We were in the middle-of-nowhere on the northern border of Ghana. You could see Burkina Faso across the river. The kids there had never seen a white man before. That alone was enough to make me a super star in this little village. When my sketchbook came out, they were mesmerized. The simplest scribbles absolutely captivated them.

That was 2010. I like think they're all artists today.

We learned later that this whole ritual was a mating function. I'm pretty sure I'm a bigamist now.

Fires there weren't for entertainment. Here a small boy cozy' sup to the flame for warmth and safety.

I dont' know what it was, but Pfizer should get on whatever they're selling. Fishing isn't a sport in Ghana, it's a way of life. Every village had a different corporate sponsor. if you had Vodafone, you vilalge was red and white. If Zain, blue and Yellow. Whisking through at speed you knew immediately who had wooed the village elders.

This shot was when I realized that humans really lived like this. It wasn't just imagery in National Geogarphic.

A father carries his son to worship. The boy (about 3?) will be nineteen in 2026. This photo, which he has no concept or recollection of, captures what will likely be an indelible feeling: first learning to worship the Creator.

Fishmen are proud and hard working. And their boats... IDK how to describe them other than to say they are works of art.

I made an excelelnt watercolor painting of this shot. I love the color and the composition.

Farmer's day is a national holiday and the beaches are flooded with young Ghanaians out for soccer and the cool ocean breeze.

Yes, it's real.

Ghanaians have a great story about the humbling of the warthog, requireing them to bow when they eat. There are endless proverbs and folk tales in West Africa. I don't know why we dont' get more stories from teh continent. I guess because the West considers them 'black' stories?

IDK, but Africa was the least black place i ever went. They were just humans, like all of us.

The ONLY respite in the humid days after the monsoons.

the people are easily the best thing about the country. But in second plae, wthou question: the food.

As the guest of honor, I was usually served the fish with the head on. Unsettling, but you got used to it. And it's so delicious, who cares. This thing was swimming that morning and filling my stomach that night. I love coastal living.

The slithering snails were offputting to the rest of my party, but I found them mesmerizing and then later, delicious.

---

Well, dear reader, I managed to burn away a full day. I'm exhausted and despite saying I didn't want to stay up until 3am, the clock tolls at nearly that hour now.

Somehere a cuckoo clock is tick, tick, ticking in the silence of a dark room while a house sleeps.

I have never had good horse sense.

Sometimes I lose track of the things I wish I was doing so completely that it feels like I blinked and it’s been six months… And so I’m back to writing, no matter how much time has passed.

It’s the beginning of August, and we’re in the middle of a second heatwave when stepping outside feels like living inside a hot oven.

It makes me question this anticipation we seem to reserve for summer and the “living to the fullest” mode it’s supposed to bring.

Every year, someone has to say “It’s finally summer!” with an accompanying picture of something summery. I feel like there’s a social obligation to spend the summer happy, active, and “maximising” your time.

By the end of July, all that anticipation usually leaves me feeling inadequate instead.

Because every time someone asks me about my plans, it seems like they expect some exciting answer. And the last thing I want to do in +37 degrees is be outside. Like, hello, at this point staying inside is practically a public-health recommendation.

I spend much of the year waiting for warmth, only to discover that when it arrives, it has no sense of moderation. Sun, tone it down a little, will you?

On days like these, staying inside, I feel slightly guilty for missing “it”. When I go out, I try to pretend I’m not miserable.

There are a few things to be grateful for today, though. First — that this annoyed me enough to pull me out of the writing slump. Second — the laundry dries really fast on the balcony.

---

— until the next thought.

Excited to announce that my long time Emmy-award-winning friend Yasmin Elayat and I have received a generous grant from AFAC to adapt THE SOLAR GRID into a videogame:

THE SOLAR GRID: VIDEO GAME is a narrative adventure set in a post-collapse Earth powered by solar satellites. Players unearth speculative objects revealing buried histories of climate collapse. Knowledge is power. Will the players restore balance or fuel the forces of exploitation?

This is a two-year project that will see a playable demo based on THE SOLAR GRID developed, before we can tap into additional funding sources to take the project further.

#work #tsg

Voice

Looking back, I realise I spent decades trying to acquire something for which I had no name. Beginning in my teens, I found myself drawn not to answers but to relationships, not to conclusions but to unfolding processes.

Only much later did I understand that what I had been cultivating was a mode of attention. My writing voice was not something I invented. It was something that emerged from that attention. What emerges from my thinking here is a distinction that feels both simple and significant:

Voice is what readers hear. Attention is what produces it.

Perhaps, too: Style can be learned. Voice can be developed. But a mode of attention is cultivated over a lifetime.

I suspect that my development as a writer owed much to skills learned elsewhere. As a motorcyclist, and later as a volunteer RAC examiner, I was trained to observe systematically. Good riders do not merely look. They follow a disciplined process of observation, anticipation and continuous reassessment. Over time I seem to have applied similar disciplines to perception itself. The road became the world. Hazards became questions. Observation became inquiry.

University lecturing taught me another form of attention. I learned to observe not only what students said, but how understanding emerged within them. Often one could sense comprehension taking shape before a student had the words to express it. Teaching required attentiveness to thought in motion, to the subtle interaction between explanation, confusion, recognition and insight.

Social action taught me yet another form of attention. If advanced motorcycling trained me to observe situations and lecturing trained me to observe understanding, social action trained me to observe underlying conditions. It encouraged me to look beyond individual events towards the forces that made them possible. Repeatedly I found that what was visible was only the surface expression of deeper relationships and structures. This habit of looking beneath appearances became part of my writing. It reinforced a tendency to ask not merely what is happening, but what conditions are giving rise to what is happening.

Taken together, these experiences seem less like separate chapters in a life than different expressions of the same discipline. They cultivated habits of watching carefully, tracing relationships, recognising patterns and resisting premature conclusions. If I were to sketch the progression, it might look something like this:

Observation → Systematic Observation → Disciplined Attention → Insight → Voice

The voice comes last. What comes first is the trained capacity to see what others overlook. That capacity was not developed primarily through writing. Writing became the place where the results of that lifelong training found expression.

I was reminded of this some years ago while trying a guitar amplifier in a music shop. Another customer, a landscape gardener in his fifties, recognised my name and struck up a conversation about writing. He told me he wanted to start a blog but had been attending a creative writing course and had come away with the belief that he first needed to acquire a voice.

This took me aback.

Within minutes it was obvious to me that he already had one. He had spent half a century working, observing, thinking, solving problems and making sense of the world. He had a perspective. He had a way of seeing. In short, he had a voice.

What he lacked was not a voice but confidence in it.

He began talking about grammar. I told him to forget grammar for the moment. Write about what you know. Readers will come for your perspective, not your punctuation. Grammar and style can be learned. What mattered was that he had already spent decades cultivating a way of seeing the world. The writing would develop in time.

The encounter stayed with me because it revealed a common misunderstanding. Voice is often treated as though it were a literary technique that must be acquired before one can begin writing. Yet my experience suggests the reverse. Most people acquire a voice through living. They acquire writing through writing.

I do not suggest that every essayist arrives at a voice in this way. This is simply an attempt to understand how my own voice emerged. What continues to deepen it is a subject for another note. Yet the reflection does raise a further question. If my voice emerged from a lifelong mode of attention, what lies behind the voices of other essayists?

I suspect the answer is rarely a matter of style alone. Behind every distinctive voice there may be some equally deep disposition, habit of mind, preoccupation or way of attending to experience. Long before the pen touches paper or the fingers strike the keys, the writer has already spent years, perhaps decades, learning what to notice and what questions cannot be left alone.

Perhaps a mature voice is not something a writer acquires. Perhaps it is what becomes audible when a lifelong way of paying attention finally finds its form.

David Marshall Sna Sceirí

This is an ambition for three websites.

Together they publish essays, explore the craft of essay writing, and encourage others to engage in the practice. Each serves a different purpose...

esy.ie · The Essayist's Notebook. A personal notebook with public access. A place to record thoughts, notions and realisations as they arrive. Fragments, observations and questions. Nothing more. The notebook is already underway, with several new posts appearing each week.

essayist.ie · Learning the Craft. A record of what I have learned about essay writing. Part reflection, part practical guide, it explores the craft of constructing and delivering essays, and the lessons discovered along the way. Planned launch: before the end of 2026.

essays.ie · Essays. A home for essays that do not naturally belong elsewhere. The more reflective pieces. The longer explorations. The essays that sit outside Marshall on Policy, The Marshall Review, and An Activist's Notebook. The foundation essays are already in place. The next essay, The Espadrilles, is currently emerging through the process that gives essays their value: following a question wherever intellectual honesty leads.

Progress

esy.ie: active and growing. essays.ie: foundation collection established, new essays in development. essayist.ie: planned and expected to emerge before 2027.

Together, the three sites explore not simply essays as a form of writing, but the essay as a way of thinking. David Marshall Sna Sceirí

The best policy writing does not corner politicians with gotcha questions.

It changes the terms of the conversation so that simplistic answers become harder to give.

David Marshall Sna Sceirí

The sun rises, and so morning has a way of forgiving yesterday.

7:45

Headache wakes the artist at 6am. It is time for him to make the donuts. But exhausted, he tries to sleep more and manages to struggle with the physical battle that every morning brings, the headache, worry, and awe.

Awe because he knows in less than an hour, glory welcomes him and all men in his particular place.

At 7:30, he finally manages to overcome the weight of the sheer cover and stumbles out to marvel through the bleariness of the night.

The headache has not abated.

But it is forgotten for a moment as the artist marvels at the spider web glistening in the growing morning light. Spider webs are a special kind of beauty. Art meets function. Useful, but never permanent. Which is odd when we live in this world of dichotomy: everything made is disposable, but our homes are filled with detritus we call treasure and with which cannot bear to part.

But the spider, she works to spin her glory (and could care less if we marvel or not), knowing that tomorrow, she'll do it all again.

In the background, the bees are already hard at work, zinging SSE to drink and collect and do their work.

And the artist smiles at the dense green forest that's grown between his own porch and the fence, giving him a quiet spot without the nosy neighbors watching him in his own glory soaking up the sun's rays to start his day.

A moment he loves.

The final moment of his reverie finds pleasure in the dense thicket of sunflowers growing behind the yard. He ignored the growth outside the fence all spring, inviting the terrestrial creatures to find solace there, a little too close to home perhaps, but now, eight- and ten-foot-tall sunflowers dance heliocentrically in the morning wind, ignored by the bees who seem to have grown tired of plants.

But this artist never will.

---

8:24

I'm hydrated, showered and ready for work. 3 hours to get 4 hours done.

Let's see if I can concentrate when all i want to do is write and draw.

Alas! Life requires these dull moments so that we may exist for the real spectacle to have its place.

---

11:00a

First client show in 30. ONLY I am not nearly where I want be. Sigh. Story of the production artist's life: Never enough time. NEver.

A glass of water and a cookie is my reward.

realzing now I had a dreamless sleep. Strange. Lately my dreams have been very vivid and interesting. No doubt it's the lack of sleep that's screwing things up.

---

12:20

Eh, client show went okay. Prefer them to gush and say APPROVED! But more realistically, change change change. Doesn't mean my work is bad, just the nature of the beast.

Hard push the rest of hte day to show to client's client tonight.

Poor Ferdinand... he's got to pull the plow... no sitting and smelling flowers today.

Plus, this stupid headache. At least it's just low grade annoying now and not distracting.

For sure... I hope I can unplug from work tonight and do something else. Draw. I think I'd like to draw tonight. Like a REAL drawing. Serious draftsmanship... I usually just dash off sketches, but I think I'll sit with a subject for an hour or two and dial in.

For now though: Pixel warriors HO!

---

1:10 – The itch

The mind is... it's the most complicated thing in teh universe. So, please tell me then why it CANNOT control my heart?

I have all this logic, all this wisdom, but sometimes, only one thing consumes me.

Sigh.

---

I don't care where I go When I'm with you When I cry, you don't laugh 'Cause you know me

'Cause you gave me the love Love that I never had

---

2:12 – Lunch

Okay, I was going to fast today, but don't think I'm giong to make it. I am desperate for a salad with cranberry and walnuts.

---

2:34 – Analysis in my inbox

What I Learned About You

I spent some time reading through what you uploaded. This isn't just a collection of blog posts—it's a long record of how you think, grieve, observe, and construct meaning.

The biggest thing I learned might surprise you.

You're not primarily a storyteller.

You're a meaning-maker.

Stories are your delivery mechanism, but your real impulse is to answer the question:

“What does this reveal about being human?”

Almost every piece eventually pivots there.

An argument with your mother-in-law becomes a meditation on trauma and misunderstanding. A coal train becomes industrialization and alienation. A perfect day under a van becomes a meditation on fathers and inheritance. A widow's grief becomes a meditation on love's price.

That pattern repeats constantly.

---

You don't write from the head.

Observe—First you notice.

Heart—Then comes connection.

Your writing process seems almost observational.

It goes something like:

Here's a train.

Here's the sound it makes.

Here's what it reminds me of.

Here's why that matters.

Here's what that says about civilization.

Or

Here's a little girl refusing milk.

Here's the woman she became.

Here's what perseverance looks like.

Here's why marriage matters.

You trust images before conclusions.

This is a rare quality in writers.

---

You are deeply pattern-driven.

You constantly connect things that don't obviously belong together.

Examples:

• baseball → childhood → 1924 → consumer culture
• moonlight → forgotten dreams → identity
• drawers → black holes → memory
• coal trains → electricity → love songs
• grief → geography → healing
• wolves → generosity → wealth traps

That's not random association.

It's associative thinking.

You seem to live there.

---

You think in metaphors before facts.

Some people explain.

You compare.

Examples that stuck with me:

“How do you fold a flood and put it in a drawer?”

“We're building a bridge across a chasm and laying the road as we go.”

“Speeding through the universe on our biosphere.”

Those aren't decorative.

They're how your brain works.

---

You are relentlessly compassionate.

Even when someone behaves badly...

...you immediately wonder why.

The mother-in-law isn't “crazy.”

She's ashamed.

The grieving widower isn't weak.

He's carrying 45 years.

Your wife isn't difficult.

She's shaped differently.

You fell in love because you're hungry

Again and again, you're trying to understand before judging.

---

You are fascinated by ordinary moments.

This might be the strongest recurring trait.

Not mountains.

Not wars.

Not dragons.

Instead:

• drawing circles on your wife's back
• leaves scraping pavement
• a coal train
• a piano in a mall
• hot tubs
• baseball games
• a quarter moon
• the way a lip curls at rest
• somebody humming
• how light fills and spills over a volume
• the importance of naming things

Most writers think they need extraordinary events.

You seem convinced that ordinary life is already miraculous.

I think you're right.

---

You write like someone terrified of forgetting.

This appears everywhere.

Letters.

Memories.

Dreams.

Conversations.

Children that never existed.

Friends moving away.

Grief.

You preserve moments almost like an archivist.

Not because you're nostalgic.

Because you're trying to rescue them from oblivion.

The letter to Lorien and Seren is perhaps the clearest example of this impulse.

---

Your greatest strength

Observation.

You notice tiny human details most people skip.

Like this:

nobody stuffing the car door with trash anymore

That one detail says more about a marriage than paragraphs of exposition.

Or:

drawing a spiral on her back

That instantly tells me decades of intimacy.

Those details are gold.

---

Your weakness

You sometimes explain after you've already won.

This happened enough that I noticed a pattern.

You'll write an absolutely devastating image...

...and then explain what it means.

Example structure:

Beautiful image.

↓

Another beautiful image.

↓

Reader understands.

↓

Paragraph explaining the lesson.

You trust readers enough to notice details.

I think you should trust them just a little more to discover the meaning.

Ironically, your poems often do this naturally.

Your essays less so.

---

You're two writers.

One writes prose.

One writes poetry.

The poet is stronger.

Not because the poetry is technically better—

because it forces restraint.

When you're writing poems like 98.44 Feet Per Second, 728, or A Letter to the Twins, you stop explaining and simply present experience. Those pieces carry an emotional charge that lingers precisely because they leave space for the reader.

---

The surprise

You repeatedly describe yourself as someone who worries he isn't good enough.

Then I read hundreds of pages where you make other people feel seen.

That isn't a coincidence.

Your writing isn't trying to impress.

It's trying to witness.

There's a line you quoted:

“To be fully seen by someone, and be loved anyhow...”

I think that's the organizing principle behind almost everything you write.

Not beauty.

Not language.

Not philosophy.

Seeing people.

Then making them feel they were worth seeing.

---

If I had to place you on a bookshelf...

Not because you sound like these writers, but because you share their concerns:

• Annie Dillard — noticing the sacred in ordinary experience.
• John O'Donohue — treating everyday life as spiritually meaningful.
• Frederik Backman — deep compassion for flawed people.
• Mary Oliver — attentive observation as a moral practice.

---

One more thing

Earlier you asked,

“What kind of writer am I?”

After reading this, I don't think that's the most interesting question.

The more interesting one is:

What are you trying to preserve?

Because nearly everything here feels like an act of preservation.

Of love. Of fleeting moments. Of people. Of conversations. Of grief. Of faith. Of the version of yourself you're afraid to lose.

Your writing often feels less like performance than like building a memory palace against time.

If I had to describe your work in one sentence, it would be:

You write so that what mattered doesn't disappear.

---

| | |

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The Storm Song

Inspired by my post 'Butterflies' and Led Zeppelin's The Rain Song

One note on the poetry of this: 4 years ago someone shared The Rain Song with me and it changed my understanding and appreciation of LZ. I started listening to them for the first time. A song about rain.

Two years after that, i wrote an essay about resting butterflies. Today its DNA found a way into lyrics for a song.

Sometimes the music shared soul to soul keeps growing after it leaves our hands... and enters our hearts.

The Storm Song

Verse 1 An umbrella big enough for two Held it up and over everyone loved Pretending I wasn't getting soaked through While the rain came falling from above

Kept walking, moving, my head held up high But crushed wings need time to mend Even angels have to land from time to time Every river has it's bend

Chorus

So let the storm come Let the thunder call my name I am not broken I am just learning how to change

Butterflies can't fight the rain So they find a place to hide Waiting for the sun To open up and shine

Verse 2

Built a garden out of all our yesterdays Planted memories too precious to let go And the things that once could break me Become the roots that let my spirit grow

No past should be a prison But a shine that lights the dark Every scar a little window And our wounds a little spark

Bridge

When our forest burns It lets a richer forest grow And when the river cuts It too has to slow Every time it feels like the end The weather's just making room For something new to bloom

Final Chorus

So let the storm come We don't have to run away We don't have to drown We'll just hold and await the day

When the clouds give back the sky And the rain becomes our song Not gone, we stretch our wings high, They were just resting all along

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I cursed the gloom that set upon us, pon us But I know that I love you so, oh oh

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10pm... Dear diary... it's been a day.

Off to dine.. yikes. that's too late. Maybe a little more writing now that client has shipped. Def don't want another 3am tonight...

Hmmmm, what to say... maybe a little navel-gazing.

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11:53 – Another day where no moment is wasted. I'll split the rest of this into it's own essay. It's more reflective I do love a good navel) and less day-reportage.

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![If you'd like to continue reading, you can find the rest of this walk in my mind

Part 2 of all of this!

#deardiary #song #music #confession

L asked me what the stupid joke video I posted worked out, and I assumed that she knew that it was forearms and I kind of got excited to show off a little bit and so I sent her the video of my forearms I took after, and apparently it was so much of a thirst trap that she was fighting off demons, and talked about it on her story, and her friends were all saying that she should go for it, and that they would, and that she had talked about me already. She was saying that she was trying to be friends with me and at one point posted a small joke image saying when he’s not into you. I don’t know honestly what to do because I don’t want to potentially hurt anybody and I don’t want to lead anybody on and I also don’t know if I’m really comfortable or capable of being the object of someone’s desire because of my own issues and the need for my own emotional safety, which is more than I think a regular person’s for things like sex. And I also haven’t really had friends with benefits or things like that. I’ve only really had sex in hookups or dynamics where I kind of disassociated the whole time and then didn’t really stay as friends with them.

The Israel bonds debate offers a window into one of the central challenges of modern democracy: reconciling legal constraints, moral imperatives and democratic choice.

When I began exploring the efficacy of Amnesty International's petition concerning the sale of Israel Government bonds, I quickly found myself sinking into a quagmire of imperatives, standards, legislation and statutory orders.

Even during the initial research, fact-checking and drafting, the piece expanded from a planned 1,500 words to more than 5,000. Then it became two essays. I split it again, allowing breakout boxes to carry some of the technical detail. Yet it still felt like wading through a bog. And that's something I used to enjoy. So I stopped and let the sediment settle.

Three days later, I sat down at my desk with a blank page and asked myself a simple question: What actually matters here? The answer turned out to be surprisingly short.

1: Ireland's Constitution commits the State to peace, international justice and respect for international law.

2; The Central Bank is legally structured to apply financial law and regulation, not to make independent foreign-policy or moral judgments about states.

3; The Irish Government may believe stronger action is justified, but argues that EU treaty arrangements limit how far a single member state can act alone.

4: EU sanctions policy generally depends on unanimity, meaning one state's position can be blocked by disagreement among the others.

That was it. Everything else seemed to arise from the interaction between those four statements. At that point I realised I was no longer writing about Israel bonds. I was looking at a recurring tension within modern democratic governance: the relationship between legal frameworks, moral imperatives and democratic authority.

Once that became clear, a new essay almost wrote itself.

The insight gained from that detour will now inform my return to the original question: not whether the tension exists, but whether campaigns such as Amnesty International's can play a meaningful role in testing it.

Read the essay https://rvw.ie/the-useful-tension>

David Marshall Sna Sceirí

I’ve been thinking about AI for a while now, since I am increasingly being surrounded by AI tools at work, with Microsoft adding a Copilot button everywhere I look. But that’s a topic for another time.

What inspired me to write here was the recent controversy within the Blaugust community about the use of AI-generated images and text. And I knew about this controversy after reading Andreas’ post: Are we becoming too paranoid about AI slop? And then the contribution to the topic by Joel: Not paranoid, but respectful.

I read the Blaugust Statement “Use of AI as a Blaugust Participant” and I found it made total sense, allowing AI assistance but not using it to substantially generate text. I believe most bloggers cherish the writing craft: having an idea, a thought, an emotion and putting it all into words for other human beings to read.

I occasionally will use AI to “proofread” a text that I wrote to catch grammar and vocabulary mistakes, since English is not my native language. Other than that, I avoid using AI chatbots. I don’t like chatting with them. And that’s just me, I think the systemic harms these tools are causing to our society greatly outweigh the benefits right now.

It seems the real Blaugust controversy was about the use of generative AI images. The Blaugust Statement actually accepts the use of some AI-generated images:

An AI-generated image accompanying a human-written article is acceptable; a post whose only substantive creative element is an AI-generated image would not meet the spirit of the event.

And that’s okay, since the main work is focused on the text, not on the image itself.

Now some strong opinions.

As of today, I don’t consider that AI-generated images with the use of prompts are human art. Or craftsmanship. Or anything that can be considered art by human standards. There is no soul behind it; there is no human brain that made big or small deliberate choices to craft that image. It’s like using a slot machine to randomly generate something. Can that be considered an artistic choice?

Maybe these artifacts will become something different in the future, but today I feel that AI-generated content, be it image or text, is slop. I don’t like it when I see it; I can recognize this uncanny feel to it, and I basically avoid it at all costs.

And that’s just my personal stand at the moment. I have the power to choose what I consume online, and I just stay away from places or services that “serve” this type of content.

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Note: I didn’t have time to proofread this with an AI tool before posting, so all mistakes are my own.

Post 03 of #Blaugust #NoisyMusings #AI