A rut
is
what happens
when you
go
where
every
one
else
has
go
ne
this
is
still
true
when
you
follow
your
own
back
trail
too
close
ly
[photo: Bull Creek, Texas, taken 2016 by Mick Parsons.]
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Poet. Essayist. Fictioner. Steamboat fireman. Bit of a grackle.
I came to understand the world of work on third shift in Winchester, Kentucky temp to permanent (this was the 90s) and with the shift differential I made $5.10 an hour. But gas was still under a dollar a gallon and you could still get six boxes of generic macaroni and cheese, the kind with the packet of powdered cheese food you mixed with butter or milk or, if it was a lean month, warm tap water, and four cans of tuna for $2. I spent the summer before my daughter was born manufacturing 3D Styrofoam deer targets. The entire summer was hot and humid and the air in the rented warehouse space was stifling and always had a slight burnt note.
I worked at the trimming station. The floor supervisor gave me a cheap fish boning knife to cut the unnecessary edges off the pieces after they cooled enough to be removed from the molds. Funny thing: liquid Styrofoam is hot and when poured into a metal mold under compression builds pressure that is only alleviated after the liquid cools.
One of the other temps, a giant, loudmouthed cracker, got his arm broken when he popped the mold too soon. The crowbar he used snapped back, popped so hard the bone at his right elbow was exposed. He came back three nights later, arm in a cast, popping molds and testing physics at the exact same volume, nothing learned.
I drove home exhausted each morning, crawled into bed, and listened to my daughter grow in her mother’s belly. Sometimes I read to her until I fell asleep.
[Day book 2026 // Winter 3.12.26]
Sirens and Other Alarm Systems
I managed to get about 30 minutes of good sleep before the storm rolled in right and proper. Prepare and don’t worry. Of the list of things I can control when the wind rolls through at 80 miles per hour, the wind is not one. I had my clothes for Monday and my boots nearby. There was a flashlight close by. My side of the bed put me between Amanda and the windows. The basement had a little shelf stable food and water, and a working bathroom. There’s lamp oil and wick in the basement for the lamp, plenty of batteries, and a battery-powered radio. So I listened. I listen for leaks and for loud bumps. I listen for the sound an approaching tornado makes. That time in Farmers, Kentucky when the tornado came through and me and the trailer where I was living were left intact, the sound of it lives in a pocket in my ear. Forever.
“I’m glad we have the alert system and sirens,” I told her.
“But?”
“But it makes it hard to hear the weather.”
[Day book 2026: Winter 3.16.26]
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Poet. Essayist. Fictioner. Steamboat fireman. Bit of a grackle.
She has inherited my heart, I think. And so I may have to teach her to fight.
I was taught to fight my heart, this loneliness that nothing fixes, even happiness. They tried, anyway. My mother encouraging gentleness. My father demanding discipline. I tried teaching these lessons that I had not learned well to my daughter the same way. It worked out as well as anyone could expect.
The loneliness. People often misunderstand the word. Loneliness. I am loved and seen and embraced and fortunate in that regard. But people are driven by primal urges the way diesel drives the steam engines on old riverboats. It radiates out, like a leaky oil can. Some are driven by love. Some by anger. Some by sadness. There are others. And then there are those of us driven by an impossible loneliness. It’s being a room full of people and not connecting to any of them. It’s being in a room full of family and friends and feeling rudderless. It’s being alone on a city sidewalk and drifting in and out traffic. It’s waking up each morning and having to remind yourself that even loneliness can be a blessing, and what a wonder it is when there is one person who can see through the mist to the heart the bleeds and wants and needs and loves and sometimes needs the loneliness, too. It sometimes drives people away without meaning to.
But it takes time to master and there are pitfalls. It’s easy to try and fill the loneliness with things. It never works.
I had to learn to fight. My daughter did, too. Her daughter has inherited our heart, I think. And I think I will try teaching her differently. That sometimes, it’s ok to fight. Especially when the world is wrong. Because the heart never is.
