Wednesday, August 19, 2026

08-19-26 What Is Missing

 I’m going to have to ask the neighbor across the street to lend me a pipe-cutting tool, if he has one, to reduce the ten-foot pipe I bought to six feet so I can convert it into a flagpole to match the ones I have for my other flags. I hate having to constantly run across the way to borrow tools, when I know I have them in the garage, and am just unable to lay hands on them because of how ill-ordered the garage is.

I will also need the loan of a drill to make holes for the screws to attach the flag to the pipe, if I can’t find the drill – I think I can manage the drill. I’ll need a circular saw to shorten the post for the little library box.

I may go to a tool rental place for one or more of those, just to spare the embarrassment.

My shame is increased because I can’t hold onto his name – he has told me more than once, but it slips out of my memory. That’s bad of me.

Well, such is life.

I want to get these things done, though. I want to get the flag on the pole so I can fly it. I paid good money to have a flag of my own design, and I think it looks great, and I want to put it in rotation with the others. I want to have the library box out there so people will take the books.

But then, I want a lot of things.

I want to post each of the things I write for the group to my blog, but I keep failing to do that. I want to finish the Frankenstein book and get it on the market and I keep not doing that. I want to begin in earnest on An American Victory, but I pledged myself to not do that until I had the Frankenstein book out, and so on.

I want these things. Honest, I do. I just . . . am not doing them.

Why am I not doing them? What do I need to do to get them done? What am I lacking? I really feel as though I lack something, that I have lost something – if I ever had it.

What is missing?

 

 Keeping Things Whole, by Mark Strand

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing. 

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in

to fill the spaces

where my body's been. 

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.


The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Begin as you mean to go on."

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