Back in 2018, my dad was invited to play bass for a friend of ours at open mic at the Fairport Brewing Company, at the corner of Church and Main in Fairport. Shortly thereafter, I started going to support him. As I watched, I wondered if there was something I could do to perform. I sang in choir in middle and high school, but there weren’t any songs I particularly wanted to perform. However, I had just started writing poetry at the time, so I thought “I can read poetry”.
Jump ahead to July 29 2019. I’d written more poems, and people had just about come to expect me to read at open mic. And my friend Mike says “Ian, I have an idea for you for a poem. Summer Nights on Church and Main.”
The wheels started churning in my head. Glancing every now and then at the sign up sheet, I began to write. By the end of the night, I had a rough draft.
The next week, I read Summer Nights on Church and Main. I introduced it by saying what Mike had said to me, then saying to him “Mike, I have a poem for you. It’s called Summer Nights on Church and Main”.
Jump ahead to August 26. Bobby, Mike’s son and runner of open mic, was leaving soon for New York City. It was his last open mic, and before that, we’d been talking about putting music to the poem. For his last night, he performed it. One day, I’ll find the words to express how happy that made me.
Whisk passed away in October 2004. She lived a long life for a mouse, but I wanted to fill the void she left. On October 20th, I got a dwarf hamster that I named Talis. He had white fur, with flecks of gray so he looked silver.
Like me, Talis was a bit of a hermit. He’d come out, run around, explore a bit, then return to the little hamster potty we got him. He brought this shred-a-bed stuff we got him – little squares of material he could shred and fluff up to build a nest – inside and pack himself in.
That’s how I remember him. A bit grumpy, ready to explore the world around him, but knew when it was time to go home.
I posted Time to Go Home on the day we celebrated as his birthday, July 20th, three months before I got him. Like Whisk, we only had a rough guess as to when his birthday was, but we celebrated it every year all the same.
Also like Whisk, Talis had a lesson to teach me all these years later. I don’t go out much (especially not now), but I don’t always keep track of the time when I do (or when I’m doing anything else, really). It’s important to know when to take a break, and it’s important to know when it’s time to go home.
On September 10, 2003, I got a pet mouse. I named her Whiskers, or Whisk for short. She was a funny little mouse, with sleek black fur, and smarter than I gave her credit for. I was told she was two months old when I got her, so I’ve always celebrated her birthday on July 10th.
Soon after I got her, my friend spent the night. We slept downstairs, and I asked if I could bring Whisk’s cage down. My parents okayed it, so that’s what we did. While we were lying awake, we heard Whisk running in her wheel. Then we heard her stop. Then she started again.
I thought that was odd, so I got up and looked in her cage. Sure enough, she was running, full speed ahead, then coming to a stop and swaying back and forth in the wheel. It was the funniest thing.
That’s my favorite memory of her, one I’ve always held dear. As her birthday arrived this year, I wrote Time for a Break thinking of that memory. It’s a good lesson to learn, even if I don’t always remember. There are many times I’ve worked through lunch, or lost track of time in my determination to get something done.
All these years later, she was still smarter than I gave her credit for. She knew when it was time to take a break.
Whenever I’m driving, I usually have music playing. It’s something to pass the time while I’m getting from point A to point B, and I enjoy listening to music.
One time as I’m driving home from work, one of my favorite songs comes on. For reference, I store my music on my phone, because then I can listen to the music I want when I want, vs. using a service or the radio that randomizes it. So I can always listen to it, but I hadn’t heard it in a while, since it hadn’t been on the current playlist in a while.
But of course, I’m also driving, so my focus is on the road, especially on the interstate where I was at the time. That being the case, I couldn’t enjoy the song as much as I wanted to. When I was able to tune back into the song, it was almost over. The moment was gone.
I realized that it was a lot like life. Those moments that pass you by because you were paying attention to something else, something that seemed so important at the time, but looking back, maybe it wasn’t. In this case, paying attention to the road was very important. But sometimes it’s not. You missed that moment for something that might not have been so important.
Enjoy the Moment is my thoughts on that, and a lesson I’ve learned. I hope other people may learn from it too.
Something I’ve learned while writing is that the best time to come up with stories is when you’re body is occupied, but your mind isn’t. Folding laundry, washing dishes, cleaning the bathroom, and going on walks are all great for this. Thus, several of my poems and stories come from thoughts I have while doing chores.
One day while washing dishes, after scrubbing a pot down, I noticed some food stuck to it. I continued washing it, but thought “how do I know it’s not clean?” The answer seemed obvious; I could still see food on it. But what about the food I couldn’t see? I figured I’d have to assume I got everything and hope for the best.
Being the weird conglomeration of thoughts and emotions my mind is, it moved to parenting. “Isn’t that basically parenting?” it asked me. “Doing the best you can and hoping you got every spot?” I supposed it was.
I’d been sitting on the idea for at least two years before I finally put it into words with Raising Children. My son turned nine at the end of June, and it’s been a difficult nine years. There was a time in third grade when I got confused by a “thought question” – a question that didn’t have a right answer, but was meant to start a class discussion. I got confused, annoyed even, because I like having a right answer, like knowing what I’m doing. With parenting, there is no right answer. I was thrown into unfamiliar territory from the start, and got upset when I thought I was failing.
It brought me comfort to think of raising children like washing dishes. No matter how tough it gets, no matter how badly I think I’m doing, I remember that it’s impossible to be perfect. I’m going to make mistakes, but that doesn’t mean I’m a bad parent. It just makes me human.
Way back in the before time of 2012, a software project of mine called Aris was accepted into the GNU project. Briefly, the GNU project is a collection of software packages claiming to respect the freedom of users and developers. Such software packages publish their source code and allow modification for any purpose.
I was excited about this at the time. I still look at the free software movement and see it as a positive. In my mind, free software respects its users by making a promise that it will favor users over money. As a professional developer, there’s a lot I can learn by studying other developers’ code. Releasing source code – human-readable code, vs. the binary files you run that are machine-readable – allows information to flow freely.
In 2018, and again in 2019, the developers of the GNU project broke into an argument. The same argument both times: should we do more to include other developers? In particular, women. This went arou