I’ve come to the water to purify and nourish me

and I’ve come to the desert to ground and vitalize me.

Where the School Bus Stops

As I was driving by a local shelter, I pulled up behind a school bus.

There was nothing unusual about it.

A yellow bus at the end of a school day. Children getting off with backpacks slung over their shoulders, carrying whatever papers, assignments, lunch boxes, and small concerns had followed them through the day.

I had seen school buses drop children off a thousand times.

I had never really thought about where every child was going.

Usually, a school bus disappears into a neighborhood. It turns down familiar streets and stops in front of houses or apartment buildings. A child steps down, walks toward a door, and the bus moves on.

But this bus stopped here.

At the shelter.

And suddenly I understood something I had never really considered before.

For some children, the school bus doesn't take them home.

It takes them back to the place where they are waiting for home.

They had spent the day doing what children do.

Math problems.

Reading assignments.

Lunch.

Maybe recess.

Maybe laughing with friends in the hallway.

Maybe worrying about a test.

Maybe wondering whether someone they like likes them back.

Maybe a teacher reminded them about homework before the final bell rang.

Then school ended.

Their classmates boarded buses too.

Some would get off in front of houses.

Some would walk into apartments.

Some would throw their backpacks onto bedroom floors and be told for the hundredth time to pick them up.

Some would open refrigerators without wondering whether there would be food inside.

Some would close bedroom doors and complain about siblings bothering them.

And some would ride until the bus stopped at a homeless shelter.

At night, families at the shelter sleep on mattress pads on the floor.

There are no bedrooms waiting behind closed doors.

No dresser where everything can remain until morning.

Just a locker.

No familiar place where a child can leave something and know exactly where it will be tomorrow.

There are families sharing space with other families, each carrying whatever circumstances brought them there and whatever hope they have that this will only be temporary.

But children remain children.

Someone still has homework.

Someone still wants a bedtime story.

Someone is irritated with a brother or sister.

Someone may have lost a tooth.

Someone can't find a shoe.

Someone wants five more minutes before going to sleep.

Someone wants to know what's for breakfast.

Homelessness doesn't somehow turn childhood into something else.

It simply asks childhood to continue under circumstances childhood should never have to understand.

And the next morning, those children get dressed for school again.

Maybe their classmates know where they slept.

Maybe they don't.

The child sitting beside them in math class may have no idea that the person borrowing a pencil spent the previous night on a mattress pad in a room filled with other families.

A teacher may know.

Or may not.

Children can become remarkably skilled at carrying private worlds into public places.

And there are privileges in childhood that those of us who had them rarely recognize as privileges.

A bedroom.

A closet.

A favorite place on the couch.

A refrigerator you are allowed to open.

A drawer containing your clothes.

A wall where something you made at school can stay taped for months.

An address.

Not luxury.

Not a large house.

Not the newest furniture.

Just a place where your things can remain overnight.

A door.

A bed.

A place where someone can say:

We're home.

Perhaps one of the quietest privileges of childhood is simply being able to assume that the place you leave in the morning will still be yours when you return.

And then there are the parents.

It would be easy to see those children and wonder how they ended up there.

But somewhere inside that shelter is also a mother trying to make an impossible situation feel ordinary.

A father trying not to let his children see how frightened he is.

Parents filling out applications.

Calling landlords.

Waiting on housing lists.

Going to work.

Trying to save money.

Trying to arrange transportation.

Trying to remember which paper needs to be signed for school tomorrow.

Trying to solve adult problems while a child is asking:

“Did you wash my favorite shirt?”

Homelessness doesn't suspend parenthood.

There are still lunches to prepare.

Hair to brush.

Arguments to settle.

Homework to check.

Children to reassure.

And perhaps there is a particular kind of pain in trying to make your child feel safe when you don't know what happens next yourself.

Still, morning comes.

You wake them.

You get them dressed.

You straighten their clothes.

You make sure they have their backpacks.

You send them out the door.

And the yellow bus comes.

For a few hours, perhaps everything looks ordinary.

School has its own rhythms.

Bells ring.

Teachers teach.

Children laugh.

Lunch is served.

Pencils break.

Someone gets in trouble for talking.

Someone raises a hand because they know the answer.

Someone stares out a window waiting for the day to end.

And eventually it does.

The children gather their things.

They climb back onto the bus.

The doors fold shut.

The driver pulls away.

One by one, children disappear through the doors of the places where they live.

Until eventually the bus reaches the shelter.

And those children step down again.

Backpacks over their shoulders.

Back to the mattress pads.

Back to the shared space.

Back to waiting.

Then tomorrow they will do it again.

And the next day.

And perhaps the next.

Until someday, hopefully, they don't.

Someday I hope the route changes.

Maybe the child doesn't know it will happen that day.

Maybe the bus follows its usual streets until the driver turns somewhere unfamiliar.

The child looks out the window.

This isn't the way to the shelter.

The bus continues.

Past houses.

Past trees.

Around a corner they haven't traveled before.

Then it slows.

There is a building with a number on the door.

Maybe it's an apartment.

Maybe it's a little house.

Maybe there isn't much furniture yet.

Maybe boxes are still stacked against the walls.

None of that matters.

Because inside there is a bed that doesn't have to be packed away tomorrow.

There is a place for the backpack.

A drawer for the clothes.

A refrigerator that belongs to the family.

A door they can close.

An address they can write when a teacher asks where they live.

And maybe that afternoon the bus stops.

The doors open.

A child steps down carrying the same backpack they carried into the shelter so many afternoons before.

But this time, the bus isn't dropping them at the place where they are waiting for home.

This time they look toward the door.

Someone is waiting for them.

This is where I get off.

The bus pulls away.

And the child knows:

I'm home.

#ArchitectureOfGrief

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Explore more writing from Silent Sentinel →

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

TBD

NOTE: remember; I'm pretty dumb. so it takes me a while to figure out some things.

3:30 am came far too early. And far too late.

Like a crusty sugarplum I sprung From bed at 8am.

Head spinning as I scored those red gold shafts of light through the living room. The morning sun was amazing. Perfect temp again.

I sat and soaked in it for half a hour of glory. Maybe I’ll get a decent fall tan. 🤣

I could have laid there and slept the rest of the morning. But I’d look like toast too long in the pan.

Quick aside: I’ve decided the best way to toast bread is buttered in the pan. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent.

I like people who have a facial expression for every thought.

I like people who squeeze every last drop out of life so that at the end they can say “I had fun.”

I like people who bring sunshine with them into every room, even if everyone else is filling it with darkness.

I like people who have a knack for turning random hangouts into core memories.

I like people who live so fully they'll arrive at 80 with enough stories to fill a memoir, money earned and enjoyed, and a heart that got plenty of use.

should be sipping café au lait in Paris instead of whatever adult responsibilities i am currently doing. Missing the Seine at sunrise.

People coming at 6:30 to screen 'The End of Oak Street'. 
CAN'T. WAIT!

Party party party.

Ng said people aren't coming for me. To remember that I'm not the center of attention. The statement confused me. I didn't know I was an attention hog. Just trying to keep the energy going.

BIG BIG change in my theocratic life. Blood isn't the barrier it once was. This is a ground shift. I suddenly need to know my blood type.

And if I get REALLY hard up. There's always plasma donations.

Spent the morning in teh ministry.

Good time.

Out to work on the ML now. Headlight polishing to restore teh factory shine. If I dazzle them with my new headlights, they won't look at the scuffed door.

I wonder how the motorcycle guy is doing.

Need to track down that oil leak too. Don't want to get stranded in the dessert.

Solving puzzles is a thrill all unto its own. Like figuring out Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo—locked away, cut off from the world, learning to read meaning in scraps, sounds, patterns, and tiny openings. There’s something intoxicating about finding the hidden passage everyone else walks past. And stopping stinky burning oil.

So. Time to find a passage on gettin these headlights restored. 2:30. Guests at 6. I'll give it two hours then prep for movie night.

headlight polishing plan:

Björk — I See Who You Are Steve Winwood — While You See a Chance Van Morrison — Glad Tidings Boston — Let Me Take You Home Tonight The Charlatans — A House Is Not a Home Yes — Saving My Heart Rick Astley — Forever and More Sinéad O'Connor — John I Love You Dire Straits — Why Worry The Cranberries — I Can't Be With You 3 Doors Down — Here Without You Rick Astley — Blue Sky That last three-song run is the part I really like:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/53agPPRvtTS3T5cTdBk2D0?si=56a7134966144cd2

More later.

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#deardiary

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Part 3: Children of the supernormal

When forming an understanding of anomalous experiences, it helps to ask the history and meaning of the concepts and terminology it has evolved from, and what those words were attempting to do. For that, the word “Spiritualism” and the history surrounding it is a worthy starting point, keeping in mind that people have had what is conventionally now known as ‘spiritual experiences’ throughout the world and history. The Encyclopedia Britannica in the early 20th century described “Spiritualism” as:

“a term used by philosophical writers to denote the opposite of materialism, and also used in a narrower sense to describe the belief that the spiritual world manifests itself by producing in the physical world effects inexplicable by the known laws of nature.” ¹

The first thing I notice with the definition is the way it spans a broad philosophical meaning and then a narrow experiential one. The second thing I notice is that the second meaning subtly concedes: inexplicable by the known laws of nature — with the crucial qualifier, known. The authors did not write “inexplicable by the laws of nature.” The key distinction is the phrasing, “known laws of nature.” The exception is, thus, built into the definition as both precaution and foresight.

I’d also note that something interesting is missing from the definition. Nowhere in its words on séances, mediums, raps, and the whole apparatus of modern Spiritualism does the word paranormal appear. The entry is a fossil of its time — written when investigators used a different term entirely, one now almost forgotten: the supernormal.

As I follow the entry, my word search takes me to Hydesville, New York, 1848.

What began the Spiritualism movement, the entry shows, was the family of Mr and Mrs J. D. Fox and their two daughters, in Hydesville, New York, disturbed in 1848 by unexplained knockings. It was one of the daughters, Kate, aged eight or nine, who discovered the sounds would obey requests — that the cause was, according to their account, intelligent. With communication established, the rapper professed to be the spirit of a murdered pedlar.

From that single household came, over time, a transatlantic movement. From knocks agreed to mean no and yes, an elaborate technology of alphabets, table-turning, trance-speaking, and materialized hands. And from the story of a murdered pedlar came a claim that the dead never left, and can be reached by certain means.

The story’s entry is remarkable less for its history than for its record, for it leaves both sides of the account open.

The account continues to indicate that experiments conducted in 1851, as part of ongoing investigations into their claims, suggested the Fox girls produced their rapping sounds by partially dislocating and restoring their own joints. Additional investigations revealed that the conditions most favorable to obtaining phenomena were also precisely those most favorable for deception. According to one Stainton Moses, a leading Spiritualist at the time and himself a self-professed medium, people did not get what they wanted or expected in 99 out of 100 cases. Further experiments by a certain professor of physics at Geneva convinced him that the unusual experiences, séances in particular, were of an unknown force. The results of which, in addition to a listing of other investigations into these experiences and claims, were inconclusive at the time, indicating that it could be deception or some other conventially unexplainable phenomena.

What should an anomalologist make of a century like that one? Perhaps the calls of fraud and the possibility of truth are not mutually exclusive. They are the same history, of course, but even the exposure of frauds and conmen didn’t explain all accounts, including those by witnesses otherwise known to be competent and trustworthy. In the end, the claims of the Fox girls were never fully accounted for, leaving witnesses to draw their own conclusions.

If I view these accounts through the lens of Part 2: the Fox girls as witnesses, Hydesville as place, the communications as account, and Crookes, the Society for Psychical Research, and ultimately the Britannica itself as observers — each deciding what the phenomena would labeled and categorized. Such categorizations are never neutral, then or now.

It is worth pausing to examine the entry's vocabulary, because it lacks its own awareness and foreknowledge of how terminology and accounts would later evolve. The entry uses the term supernormal rather than paranormal, which came into context and the lexicon years later. Supernormal was coined by Frederic Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, based on a need for a term to include the beyond-normal without theological commitment. Supernatural belonged to the church. Supernormal was an attempt at a neutral perspective.

Paranormal came onto the scene in English in 1905, a loanword from the French, and for three decades the two terms competed, with the newcomer winning sometime around 1937-1938 due, at least in part, to J.B. Rhine’s experimental program at Duke University, which was part of the same shift that retired “psychical research” in favor of parapsychology, a term coined by philosopher Max Dessoir in 1889. The séance moved to the laboratory, and the vocabulary followed it, where it would, by the end of the 20th century, begin to fade from serious discourse and take up new residence in popular culture and mass media as entertainment.

What I find interesting, however, are the prefixes rather than the succession.

Super- means beyond. The supernormal rises above the normal; it claims transcendence, however carefully disclaimed. Para- means beside. The paranormal is the neighbouring country — not above the world, adjacent to it, a republic next door whose border nobody has satisfactorily mapped. And beneath both sits the parent term of this series: anomalous, from the Greek anōmalos — uneven, irregular; not against the law, not above it, not beside it, but simply off it. Outside the pattern.

Each prefix is a small, subtle ontology. Each word, in being chosen, redefines what kind of thing the phenomena were permitted to be: transcendent, adjacent, or merely unruly. There was no adjudication involved as to how these terms entered the vernacular of common discourse and conversation. The drift from supernormal to paranormal to anomalous was a century-long slide and the witnesses whose experiences were being renamed were, as usual, not part of the result.

There is a lesson here for the anomalologist, and it parallels a theme I began in Part 1: the classification of anomalous experiences is never neutral. Neither is the classifier's dictionary, often smuggling in biases and motivations masked by the veil of clinical objectivity, theological canon, or mystical desire.

Whatever became of Hydesville, the movement it began died long ago as an institution leaving behind only traces of the legitimate questions those events triggered.

Strip the séance rooms of their conjuring, the mediums of their cracked toes, the century of its documented fraud, and something remains that neither side has been able to remove. What remains still are the central underlying questions of what was left unexplained and why. This does not mean that investigation into the supernormal-paranormal have ceased. Merely to say that they have transformed over the decades since, from shocking domestic phenomena to religious propaganda to streaming jump-scare entertainment.

Despite this evolution, roughly one-third to one-half of the given populace report having personally experienced at least one such experience in their lifetime.² That’s not an insignificant figure. More interestingly, I suspect, is that most people avoid discussing such experiences openly, leaving any sharing of them to closed, confidential conversations with psychologists, priests, or sympathetic therapists. I would also presume that any resulting explanations or conclusions they arrive at are likely as varied as the people and encounters themselves. Experiences that occur within the world, framed as of the world — beside or outside its known laws.

Here the honest scholar meets the central problem, and I should admit it. A strange dream is not an anomaly. Noises in an old house are not anomalies. The feeling of being watched in an empty parking garage on a late Sunday afternoon is not an anomaly. Each is odd; none crosses any line an impartial observer could identify and explain. And yet somewhere between the odd and the anomalous there is a boundary, no one knows precisely where, and every party to this history — the grieving mother, Faraday with his unconscious muscles, the aged encyclopedia entry — has stood at that boundary and decided, or refused to decide, where the Hydesville phenomena belonged.

The anomalologist, I propose, does not adjudicate the truth or falsehood of such accounts, or draw the line between them. Certainly, each person who encounters them will draw their own conclusions, which may or may not change with time and experience.

What I’m left with is the position the anomalologist takes toward the vocabulary of the last two centuries. I’m not one to discard terms or choose victors. I gather them while keeping their history, meaning, and function.

The spiritual remains the oldest term, the manifestation of a spiritual world into the physical, the belief of the mourner at the séance. It deserves neither praise nor condemnation. The term simply identifies what the experience meant to those who lived it. The supernormal remains what Myers forged it to be, a term of careful trespass, beyond the normal without requiring theology. The paranormal remains the word that conventiionally won out a century ago. And encompassing both of them is the anomalous, making no promise about divinity, transcendence, adjacency, or meaning. It claims only that a pattern exists.

None of these terms is wrong. Each is a piece of a larger puzzle, forged by the people who needed them, the eras they inhabited, and the cultures they inherited.

#Anomalology

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Notes:

1. Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, Volume 25 (1911).

2. Bauer E. (2004). “Panel Discussion: Counseling persons with exceptional experiences: The example of the IGPP.” in Paper presented at the 47th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association. 319–324.

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What is Anomalology?

• Part 1: Defining the Undefinable
• Part 2: Anomalies and Frames
• Part 3: Children of the supernormal

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

Créditos · © 2025 Juanma Menéndez

Esta obra está licenciada bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución 4.0 Internacional (CC BY 4.0).

Esto significa que puede ser compartida, copiada, adaptada y distribuida en cualquier medio o formato, incluso con fines comerciales, siempre que se dé el crédito adecuado al autor.

#procesos

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

“Greenland will be a policeman, and it will extend to Iqaluit.”

— jtw

Sometimes I wonder how I became a pastor.

Yeah, I know the official story.

I went through CAMS. C-A-M-S. I studied. I worked. I went through the exhorter program. I did what they told me to do.

But then, right before I could take my final test, my son was diagnosed with bone cancer.

And suddenly, that test didn’t matter very much.

I wasn’t leaving my son to go take an exam.

So I waited a year.

The next year came, and because of a miscommunication, I missed it again.

Another year.

Another delay.

Another round of studying because things had changed.

At the time, it felt like life kept getting in the way of ministry.

Looking back, I realize something.

It was the ministry.

God wasn’t keeping me from my education.

He was giving me one.

Sometimes I wonder how I became a chaplain.

Then God starts reminding me.

Back in 2006, there was Grandma Logan.

Colon cancer. Hospice.

Mom and I were there taking care of her.

Then Dad got sick. COPD. His breathing became harder, his world became smaller, and Mom and I took care of him until he passed away.

I was a caregiver for Grandma.

I was a caregiver for Dad.

Then came my son.

Bone cancer.

The very reason I couldn’t take my ministerial exam became another classroom.

No desk. No textbook. No professor.

Just cancer.

Fear.

Prayer.

Hospitals.

Waiting rooms.

And learning how to stand beside somebody you love when you cannot fix what is hurting them.

Years later, I stood in my own church and married that same son to Kaylee.

There were probably 80 to 100 people in that sanctuary.

Love filled the room.

It was beautiful.

Then Kaylee began helping take care of him. As he grew older and matured, he learned to take care of himself.

And then there was Mom.

Mom had been my mother.

Then she became my co-parent, helping me raise my children.

But dementia is a thief.

Little by little, it took pieces of her away.

And somewhere along that road, the woman who had once tucked me into bed became my little girl.

I tucked her in.

I kissed her forehead.

And at night, I would have her repeat the Lord’s Prayer with me—

the same prayer she had taught my children,

the same prayer she had taught me when I was a child.

Life had turned the whole thing around.

The hands that once cared for me were now in my hands.

And I cared for her.

So sometimes I wonder how I became a chaplain.

How I became a pastor.

And then I look backward.

Grandma.

Dad.

My son.

Mom.

Hospice rooms.

Hospital rooms.

Bedrooms.

Deathbeds.

Wedding altars.

Church altars.

And suddenly I can see it.

God had been training me the whole time.

I thought I was being delayed.

God was developing me.

I thought life kept interrupting my ministry.

Life was becoming my ministry.

And now I’m a caretaker for a church.

Because pastors aren’t just preachers.

We’re caretakers.

We take care of bruised souls.

Hurting hearts.

Weak faith.

People who come through the doors carrying wounds nobody else can see.

And we stay with them.

We pray with them.

We preach Jesus to them.

We walk beside them until the bruises begin to fade, the weakness begins to strengthen, and the broken places begin to heal.

Not because the pastor has the power to heal them.

But because Jesus does.

He came to bind up the brokenhearted.

And maybe that’s how I became a pastor.

Maybe that’s how I became a chaplain.

Not because one day somebody handed me a certificate and said,

“Now you’re ready.”

Maybe God had been preparing me for decades.

One bedside at a time.

One broken heart at a time.

One goodbye at a time.

And I didn’t even know I was in school.

Choir sound is different

Over the last year, Keri and I have been working on a choir sound. We got some things, read some things, and went to town on experiments. We got in the garage. We got the closet. We even tried the shower. We just did a job for a cool song from Scotland by Andrew Anderson, coming soon. We feel good about the choir sound now. I wanted to talk concepts about making good choir in your songs.

Disclaimer:

First off, both Keri and I grew up in protestant church choir and that has a lot to do with our sound. We are not trained, we just showed up. My concept of choir might be slightly different than yours if you have never sung at vacation bible school, or a funeral, or a wedding.

If you were a dozen people, it would be really loud.

I learned by placing different mics in different rooms that the nicer mics get to do their thing in large spaces. I found this crucial for making convincing choir tracks. The room had to be bigger than my normal tracking space.

The mic I am currently using for these kinds of tracks is the Myrtle by Ear Trumpet labs. The Myrtle picks up from 3 feet away like nothing. So I put it in a large room, imagining the sound going out in front and not being able to bounce back to the mic. Huge space. Garage works. A hallway gives interesting and notable results. The small insulated room isn’t even usable here. I would have to change mics.

It has to move.

So I have my big space and I set my mic, it never moves through the whole process. But Keri and I move a ton. I have a taped out semi circle, 4 X’s, we’ll take turns. No choir we have done before sounds good up on a smaller mic, standing in the same spot. But the choir tracks have movement and realism if we stand in 4 or 5 different spots. For Andrew, we did 2 groups of 4 spots. Each.

This works for other instruments too. If you play strings, put the cello, bass, viola, and violin, in all different spots. I’d probably just go with a semicircle there too. But you can get a little crazy…

A fabulous way to learn your mics.

Maybe you have a big room with a little closet. Experiment with standing in the closet, facing the room, singing or playing. With the Myrtle, I get very usable sound this way. But I also get it with the SM58 too. Now turn the operation around. Stand in the room, face the closet, see what happens. I think this helps me with mic placement everywhere, just having done it at home. By doing this, I can echolocate places for microphones better. I have a hearing memory of their reaction to different size spaces. Muscle memory is talked about a lot in other jobs.. I use a lot of hearing memory.

Now do it with multiple distances away and to the side of that mic. You might not realize it, but you are building a choir!

Small set up, large space.

Choir tracks need space, an ensemble mic, an iPad, an interface. It is not necessary to try to force tracking at the house when you can borrow a church’s sanctuary to track vocals. We have. We’ve tracked whole live songs in churches too. Tiny donation, they open the doors. The nice mics love it. They can breathe.

Choir coming on The Kintners record out Christmas.

This time we wanted to try at the house since we are recording a double-album ourselves. Andrew got us off our butts about the choir. Glad he did. I think we have it worked out. One less thing to worry about for the record, choir.

Kelly Kintner

The Horses Mouth

The Kintners

Djembe Funk

I posted some time ago about how I was going to start prepping for a 5k running event. Now here I am, weeks later, at the other end of that prep. It went quite well. To be honest, surprisingly well.

Yesterday was the last day of intermittent fasting. This morning was my last run while wearing the weighted vest. I've never done anything like this in my entire life. I don't know if what I've been doing will result in a personal best on race day, but I have to say that I feel quite healthy and fit.

I've been at this point prior to other running events. Just days to go. It is an odd place to be every time. It is the point where no more gains can be made. I will be at the peak. Whatever the outcome of my efforts is meant to be; it will be that.

These prep routines for running events are kind of funny to me. I go into it all knowing that I could train harder, and be faster, if only running was the main focus of my life. I could be on a very strict 5k training plan that has been used, tried and tested, by professional athletes.

As it is though, running prep is not my main focus. I have to find ways to fit it into my life that revolves around doing a very physical, and at times stressful job for 40 hours a week. It consumes more of my waking hours than anything (getting ready, getting there, doing it). It is not easy... but what is, really?

I started to get into fitness just prior to the beginning of COVID restrictions. I told those stories elsewhere in this blog. I never would have started running if the gyms had not closed when they did. I have learned a lot about running over the years. Each year has been different. I kind of view it as a strange skill that I have developed over the last few years. Also a strange knowledge I now have about what my body is physically capable of.

This year I was doing interval runs, and stairmaster, while wearing a 12 pound weighted vest. I had never done this before. I expected it to be hard, and it was. Very hard. I expected weight loss, my legs to become stronger, and my resting heart rate to become lower. Those things happened. Some things happened that were a surprise: Number one would be how my balance has become noticeably better. My upper body strength has increased. It forced me into engaging core muscles, and also forced me into better running form. I can feel that I have increased lung capacity. These things were a surprise, but after thinking about it, they make sense.

Overall I would say that I feel quite good. Race ready. I would also say though, as good as it feels, it is very unnecessary for living daily life. Not only unnecessary but is also, to me anyway, mentally unsustainable. I can be fit and healthy without being race ready.

https://write.as/thingsleftunsaid/event-prep

https://write.as/thingsleftunsaid/running

https://write.as/thingsleftunsaid/fitness

College Football Saturday

If I am home (circumstances may call me away, but let's hope not) and have the option, my first college football game of choice today finds the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers travelling to Bloomington, Indiana, to play the Indiana Hoosiers. The game is scheduled to start at 3:00 PM CDT and good radio pregame coverage should be available an hour earlier. GO HOOSIERS!

And the adventure continues.

At long last, I now have a physical film library again.

In a way.

Going the DVD route is simply not an option for me, as I don't have the space to store that shit. Plus, the constant moving over the past 12 years has put me in the state of mind of thinking twice before adding to my physical possessions (I still maintain a storage unit back in Houston filled with books, comics, zines, records, and I don't even remember what else).

So, with leaning on anything like DVDs or videotapes being out of the question, and being really sick of the subscription-based streaming service model, I opted to go the SSD route. One terabyte dedicated to film. It is presently loaded with 171 titles accounting for a little over 200 gigs. Room for much, much more. Now I just need to get another dedicated drive for TV shows, one for music, and one for books and comics (still prefer physical for those, but not everything I'd like to have in physical form is within reach, plus it'd be a bonus to have a digital copy of all physical books I acquire because I've lost most of my physical belongings at least 3 times in my life and it never hurts to have a backup just in case).

#journal

The Arrow, Painted

To the North And policy of neighbours This is the sight we knew Failed landings by the yardhouse And a hijack of esteem We were very aware, just- A friend And in the swill Of the colleagues we share Man will have a plan of time And to be shoring now A difficult way in And subservients of war And there will be no money Nor peace- even if we liked our reach But then reviled- The rightist fight It is only my country And it is a landgrab No benediction Beauty bereft And the tides of another- will do us in And to speak of the arousal The ancient high One can live with anxiety But this operand is here The living and paid little The worst work in the world- which is to live under the United States Plain in sight There are plaintiffs And there is will And to the first of mind We were errant to the South But Denmark sold us As mercury would And seven times the Dutch In a river of years

And mercy howled For honest endeavour And we were chains on a cross The living avoidant And this river Would it stay the same

And the Earth ate the salt And there was no plan But the United States and money

Fresh as going alone There is errant ground And convolutions of wicca For the Sun has a plan,- so they thought But I was hoping- To be eating peace for dinner And now there is none.

20 Hours

Russia sees its reward In coming clean at first And time’s original thought Why verses Rome to court Apart as we are Symphonic distress To the notions that be A place in Quispamsis becover And Nuuk across the arc What difficulty Rome In quarts of lethal wonder To the sacristy we kept And Donald never came And stole our world And our share of thoughts to know Cavity to stream Pieces fired anew And Jehovah’s Witnesses came To speak across the road Inefficiency be And Nuuk would go to Rome Beatified at night Thus early cross Fit for dozen wonder Why excessive Kushner For all to fall forget And banking proud To Russia as they saw Greenland across the bay.