The Soup is a dispatch. The kind of thing you can read in the car before you go in, or on the couch after you get back. Each one names something. That's the whole job.
Newest first.
The Soup
Dispatches from the working life
Short pieces. From the counter, the parking lot, the couch. Named things. The Drain. The Calendar. The gap between what the day asked of you and what you actually have left. Take what's useful. Leave what isn't.
How I Deal With Bullshit, Apparently
I asked for a flowchart of how I deal with bullshit. It came back with branches, and every box in it was real.
The Geometry of Experience
I set out to plot the Grey Zone like a fifth dimension. What I got instead was a picture of orientation: where you are, when it is, and which way you are facing while it happens.
The Expansion
The work is growing, in public and in private. Spiritual Homesickness is a real book now, The Gospel of the Grey is stirring, and a promise about the quiet: if I go dark, I am not gone. The return counts most.
The Taste of Hot Soup Before It Gets Cold
The manuscript is done and the first readers are around the fire. The work now is handing the bowl across the distance before it goes cold.
The Holy Interruption
Rest is not the enemy of the work. Some interruptions are holy. A dispatch on sickness, the body, and the part of caring you keep forgetting to include.
The Rehearsal
Everybody is asleep and the house finally lets go of you. A cheap candle, a dark kitchen, and the conversation you keep running in your head. The private labor of preparing for impact.
What the Stage Stop register prints at 5am
The register at the Stage Stop off I-84 Exit 71 prints long. Half a yard of thermal paper for six dollars and twenty-seven cents. You fold it once, then again. It goes in the inside pocket of your jacket with the three other receipts from this week. You have not looked at them. You will not throw them away.
The thing in your chest in a waiting room
The middle chair is the one nobody picks. You sit there because the other chairs were taken, or because you stopped caring which chair. The coffee has been gone for thirty minutes. The cup is empty and slightly crushed where your thumb has been resting on it. You haven't set it down. You won't, yet.
Two men in a parking lot, telling the truth
The meeting starts at nine. They're out there by eight-forty. One drives a white panel van. The other is in a Carhartt vest with a cigarette going. Twenty words combined, maybe, over six months. They don't know each other's last names. But when the van pulls in, the other one looks up. And there's a nod.
Nobody likes oysters except on Friday
The Calendar is the thing that tells people what to want so they don't have to ask. It is not a thing in your head. It is a thing in the air, in the inboxes, in the seasonal display at the grocery store. It runs on a schedule older than any of us and most of us have never noticed it.
The thing they do to you on purpose
The building releases you at 5:02. Not with ceremony. The doors just open and there's the parking lot, and the light is different than it was when you walked in, and your body doesn't know what to do with that yet. You sit in the car for a few extra seconds. You're just… waiting for something to drain out.