The Eleventh Day

4 January 2026

I have been away from “posts” for some time now, coughing up my thoughts only on “notes.” This has been mainly due to my work schedule, and convenience sake. Has that shift moved the precious needle any on my following here—helped, hindered, halted? I don’t know. And the thought of looking into it immediately tires me. Substack is not my Innisfree (please think Yeats, not cosmetics).

Today is the day we take down the Christmas tree, the lone holdout of our holiday decor, and place her back in her tomb for another year. Seal her off, blow out the candle. Take-Down-Day has always been depressing for me but Christ Kroger already has Valentine hearts on display, so I guess get with the program. Or better yet, not. I’m thinking of stringing a few lights on our back deck for the whatever a bleak midwinter in Arkansas will look like. Beacons, little pricks to light the way should Jesus-the-thief decide to come back in the gnarly gloom. I want Jesus to know where to find us. The fires of Blase-dor.

I’ve got a few things I’m chewing on for the days, weeks, months, year ahead. I won’t tell you though. I’m not being cagey, but a wise man once told me not to give my gold away too fast. Let such dreams and visions settle down in your blood a bit, honor their magnificent possibility by giving them some privacy. Room to root, grow you know.

One thing I will reveal, and it’s not dream or vision but yawp. A recommitment to write in blood (Denis Johnson). I’m so dead-sick of therapeutic, theoconfusingic, instagrammic, technocrappic language I could scream. I do scream. I will scream. Now if that’s your gig, then gig on and I pray you the shoulders to shoulder such a statement from me. But as for me and my bones, I will not. Such language has and is moving us further from the muck of our making. It has and is unmaking us. This recommitment has been bolstered by reading Martin Shaw’s Bardskull. I don’t know how to describe this book, I’ve honestly no clue what it’s about. I gather it drove his friendly neighborhood marketing team batshit batty. This book holds no takeaways, only runaways, vagrant hairy inklings intent on causing mischief in your cranium and likely grief for those who love you. But I do know this - it is chock full of a language that sets my blood a boil, a whirling-dervish of nouns and verbs and vouns and nerbs that rip me apart then stitch me back together. I look up from a page a torn but mended man squinting out at the new same old year ahead.

I leave you with a quote from Shaw’s madness -

Can you so gut the world with your presence that you leave a scar?

Maybe.