We have a bowl of broken glass, which is an odd thing to say because my wife has been dead for nearly five years. But old habits are hard to break and I almost always think in the plural, especially when it comes to things around the house. But back to the bowl, because saying you have one full of broken glass might also be an odd thing to say. But I’ve got one and it’s full.

Ah, the mysteries of life. One day your hdmi cable works. The next day it doesn’t. Is it the port on the computer? Or the port on the monitor. Is it the cable? You check the device manager. Nothing. You restart the computer. Nothing. You turn off the computer. Completely. Turn it back on. Voila. Everything works. No one will ever be able to explain why it stopped working. It just did. Maybe a little electron got caught going where it shouldn’t. Maybe two instructions got stuck in a digital doorway.

Maybe it’s just that time of my life, but bleakness feels omnipresent and the turmoil of the world feels as though it’s sitting at my backdoor. It’s probably my fault. I like technology and the algorithms know my desires. A deadly combination, I’m sure. Most days I can make my way to the light, but in a world where everyone wants your attention, sometimes it’s hard to ignore the noise.

It was a good Father's Day. I got calls from the two children far away, and had a great evening talk and walk with my son next door. We looked at plants, talked about trees, and discussed the shape of gardens. In the afternoon I watched the US Open. The only man to shoot under par won it, and he had to do it with a 64 foot putt on the final hole in the rain. It was wonderful to watch.

There was a time when a nine a.m. appointment would have hardly deterred me from my daily writing. But that time is long past. I am now perfectly content to let the writing slide for a day or even two. It happened yesterday. My back is wonky and I needed my massage therapist to lay hands upon me. The appointment was at 9 a.m. So, I drank my coffee, tidied up the bedroom, and made the drive. No writing was done. This morning there is still soreness, but I am much improved and a larger disaster averted.

Woke up this morning to a house full of thrown breakers which opens up a range of technical mysteries I am ill prepared to address. I can only assume some strange slug of power came down the line last night as I slept. All the breakers are back in place and nothing seems amiss so it’s unlikely I’ll find a dead raccoon in the attic although I suppose I should walk around and look.

Memory is a tricky thing. I’m fairly certain I once owned a book titled The Music of the Spheres. I bought it for some English Lit class. I think. Heck, that was in the 70s. So, it’s likely my memory is faulty, but I still have most of my English Lit books because, well, I like books. But a quick search of my library was to no avail. So, it’s likely the little paperback disappeared somewhere in one of the moves.

I had a wandering day yesterday. Drove to Luckenbach. Listened to music. Drove to Fredericksburg. Listened to music. At both places I ran into friends. We talked, shared stories, and drank a beverage or two. It was a warm day, but in the shade with a breeze, it felt nice to be outside amongst the living. There was even talk of plans, of things to do, and places to go. It was the sort of day that gave you hope there would be other days like it to come.

When it came time to rise this morning, I pulled a pillow over my head and snuggled back down under the covers. And actually, I was already out of bed when it came time to rise, so the decision required me to get back into bed. And it did it. Unapologetically. It was nice and warm. As I lay there, I even thought for a brief minute that maybe I should have a whiskey drink to start my day. I mean, whiskey does make me feel good. So, why not?

I’ve always valued punctuality. Start times are when you get there. That’s why they’re start times. Yesterday, I was invited to a gathering that was to start at six. It takes me an hour to get to the destination in question. So, I geared my day around that travel time. I even left a little early to get gas. But at the station when I keyed in the destination it announced my arrival time as 6:45, which meant I was going to be, gasp, late.

I am puzzled by the mystery of what others see and hear and why. I could stand or sit for hours looking at the Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum. It’s the same with any painting by Turner at the Tate. I love Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor. Or Billie Gibbons playing Blue Jean Blues. I love the puzzle of quantum mechanics, geology, and chaos theory. They’re all things that strike a chord within me and release whatever it is my body releases when it sees or hears something of beauty or interest.

I’m on a new computer. Well, newer than my old but not really new, new. It’s used. Anyway, except for the operating system, I’m trying to exist outside the Microsoft Universe. I am not sure it’s worth the effort. I am an old dog and I miss the software where I performed my old tricks. At the moment, it seems as though I've simply traded one all encompassing tech universe for another. Still, I have to try because I’m engaging in a collaborative effort with my daughter and she knows the new universe.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Aesop’s fox and his unattainable grapes. He tried. He failed. He walked away. To ease the pain, he decided the grapes were probably sour and not worth having. Nice move actually. He kept his self-esteem, and moved on to hunt for other grapes more accessible. And while he was hunting, maybe he had time to think about how he went about getting the grapes and came across a new method, something different to employ so that the next time he encountered high grapes, they’d be his.

Spent yesterday in mostly contemplative silence broken only by two requests for directions from store clerks and a song I sang in my bedroom as I played my guitar. Did three loads of wash. Practiced putting on the living room carpet. Took a short walk. Fixed a pot of navy beans. Watched the PGA championship, and spent some time sorting out my needs and desires. I’ve found it’s important that one gets those in the right buckets because you can go broke financially and emotionally if you mix them up.

One of these days I think I’ll ask one of the AI programs to write me 300 words in three paragraphs on some topic that strikes my fancy. Although, frankly, I’m terrified it will do a much better job than I ever could. Still, I think it might be fun. After all, it’s drawing on the writings of some fairly good people, and I’d still have to edit it and get it ready for publication. And I’ve heard that the prompt you use to get the outcome you want is fairly important. So, that would keep me involved.

We graduated a grand-daughter from college yesterday. Now she’s on to graduate school, and work in her chosen field which appears to be sports information. I say this because the world is changing fast, and I think chosen fields in general are drying up faster than corn in a hard drought. We laughed, at first, about the commencement speaker, a local weatherman, but I thought his speech about preparedness was spot on. 

We buried the kitten. Actually, my son buried her. He found her in the grass beneath the small cluster of oaks. There was no sign of a struggle or any damage. He dug her a grave beneath the trees and covered it with limestone rocks to keep the digging scavengers away. All around are turks caps, rock roses, and spiderworts. A nice resting place.

There were days, and in the not too distant past, when I was up in the morning and moving fast. At home, on the road, wherever I was, the alarm rang and the day started. It was time to get up and write, or get up and go to work, or just get up and go. A day was afoot and it shouldn’t be wasted. There were words to find or roads to drive or things to get done around the house. I was a going and doing machine. The world was a set of class five rapids and I was good with the paddle.

A blessed rain is falling this morning in my piece of the Hill Country. Slow and steady. No breezes signalling a fast moving storm although thunderstorms are forecast for later this morning. We shall see. We’ve been a blank spot recently when it comes to meeting forecasts. Rain all around, but none for us. It happened last Friday evening. There was rain just down the road, but none fell on my little town.

An interesting thing has happened to me as I age. My paradigm of how I see the world has shifted. It started when I began wrestling with the idea that the sun didn’t actually rise or set. It was earth doing the moving, and I wanted to shift my language to say that. It continued to change when I realized, several months ago, that seeing was a passive activity. Light was coming to me. So, last night, as I did a three a.m. ramble and stood outside under the stars, my face turned skyward, I knew I was being bathed in starlight, in much the same manner as when I stand beneath a warm shower. Interesting feeling.