monday, 20 october 2025
i slept mostly through the night. the recent cold, blustery air that has descended upon us feels marvelous to me. i love cooler weather and when the leaves change and the skies become clearer. it restores me.
when i got out of bed, the dogs followed me. the sun had not yet made its existence known but the dogs encountered no owls, opossums, or rabbits this morning. in and out, quick.
i settled into the couch to solve my morning puzzles (NYT et al) and turned on the tv to start a movie. usually these early morning movies come from the horror or action genres, categories my partner does not usually care for so i can watch them without thinking they might like to share them with me. i ate a tiny breakfast of aussie bites and orange juice. the dogs huddled up on a furry blanket near me on the couch.
i made coffee, got dressed, and went to work. unremarkable. not unremarkable-
when i went into the garage to leave for work, i had to get in the back of my vehicle for a jacket. as i opened the door, i realized that i had left it inside. “oh. you know what…?” i said quietly to myself as i paused in the dim light.
i heard a soft voice answer near me “what?”
the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. beat. beat. breathe. i realized that the “voice” i had heard actually came from my belly. a gurgle from my gut sounded to my mind, focused on my jacket inside the house, like the word “what.” pareidolia. our brains evolved to see patterns, especially those generated by humans: faces, human body outlines, voices, eyes, etc., etc. because of the silence in the garage, i could clearly hear my bowels working and because i had gone into a semi-trance state pondering the location of my jacket, my brain had interpreted the gut sound as a word. still, it unnerved me as i closed the vehicle door and went back inside. this stuff happens to us all the time and i have to wonder just how many paranormal encounters amount to occurrences just like this. the other night, i turned my head a bit and caught movement in the hallway from where i sat in the living room. my mind immediately said “cat.” well, we have no cats right now, our remaining two having died earlier this year – one much more recently. so, ghost cat? no – a reflection on my glasses from the television seen in contrast to the dark hallway. i replicated it several times just to make sure. but unless you practice and think about this kind of thing quite a bit to retrain yourself, people must see and hear ghosts quite a bit. seemed an appropriate topic for spooky season.
i went home for lunch as usual, ate some soup that i did not want (but tasted fine), talked with my partner, and goofed with the dogs. then, back to work.
leaving work after a few more hours, i stopped at a grocery store to pick up some food that we did not get with our regular grocery run over the weekend plus quite a bit of beer. a variety of beer. a sampling of several beers. one of my daughters has a wedding coming up and she put me in charge of games and booze so i have carefully curated some wines and beers for the event. i have not yet finished, even as i type this, but i can see the finish line. i came home and cooked dinner: chilaquiles, beans, and eggs. we sat at the table on the patio where we could all (dogs included) enjoy the weather and talked about the day and impending weekend. we then took a drive. my partner has been cooped up in the house for a while and appreciated getting out. we stopped along the way to grab drinks to enjoy as we tooled around listlessly. we left the doggos at home.
we got back home just before sunset and settled in for some television (The Great Pottery Throw Down and a PBS show or two, i think) and the last bit of a chocolate cake we had. i ate the cake; my partner only had a bite. i fed the dogs, let them out in the yard, played with them inside for a short while, then we retired to bed.
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epilogue
this seems to be the last Middletown diary entry. i have trouble believing it because projects like this can often sputter back to life for short one-offs or special directives. but i choose to believe those in charge of this project. for now. 🙂
my first diary entry dates from 2018, apparently the 2nd official “diary day.” i had to go back to look at the first one before finishing the last one. a LOT has changed over the past 8 years, with me, with my life, and with the world. that first diary day happened on a Super Bowl sunday. what a hoot. that seemed serendipitous because of our massive apathy for such events. we find it truly unnerving how the U.S. treats this sports tournament like a holiday. especially for a sport so bland and soulless. reading the diary allowed me to glimpse the life and mindset i had pre-pandemic, prior to the descent into the stupidity of the current governmental leadership, prior to personal life changes largely stemming from the pandemic, prior to losing all three of our cats, and even prior to getting our dogs! we had not yet found our first mutt when i wrote the first entry. we found him a few months later and i mentioned him the first time in diary day 4.
i have done my level best to serve this project while protecting my anonymity. i hope that the former did not suffer too much from the latter but i feel i have done right to protect my and my family’s identity. i don’t think anything bad could really truly happen but, honestly, i am aware that the identity of other diarists have been figured out through details they put in their entries and i am quite sure that people who really know me and my family can figure out my entries even though i have obfuscated personal info as much as i could. my very sense of ethics surrounding confidentiality might even have given me away!
i really do hope i’ve served something to this project. i did my best to represent my own voice in this community so its constituent diversity could be glimpsed by future scholars and enthusiasts. i think recording something of the activities and thoughts of daily living of real individuals in a certain time and place provides so much insight into the richness of the human condition and how we survive and thrive but also connects us with other humans who lived disparate lives that would otherwise have been unknown.