“See your face in my mind as I drive away. ‘Cause none of us thought it was gonna end that way.” -TS

Thinking about relationships, and how they end. The sadness and sometimes excruciating longing that they leave in their wake. The also rans, near misses, could-have-beens; moments that completely failed to snap together, like magnets or anything else.

There’s a joke I make at the office, every chance I get, which you can probably imagine almost always fails to land well: “Only the good people leave.” It’s pretty subtle, I admit, and takes a deep cynicism and self doubt to actually find funny because it implicates both me and you as some of the not good people who are still around to have what amounts to an exercise in reverse Survivorship Bias.

It probably also helps if you’ve been around the U. (Or another similar organization) a while; some of these realities take time and seeing the patterns loop back and start from scratch all over again to really sink in.

Here’s to all the good people. Gone from here, but certainly not forgotten. At least, not by me.

"I was a dreamer before you and you let me down."

A post shared by Scott Cooper (@stearth) on Oct 12, 2017 at 1:59pm PDT

Writing these blocks in my studio notebook; the cheapest thing I could find during Back To School Days at Target. (“today’s writers’s block” is a pretty terrific title, if I may say so.)

Flipped that saddle-stitched booklet over the other day, after layering another block of ink with words over words over words a torrent of half thoughts, partial truths, semi-revealed secrets and saw that it was made in Vietnam, and some part of my brain spit out, “Oh, the country that almost ruined my childhood.” Like it was discovered truth, historic wisdom long-chiseled in stone and just now revealed by a trick of the light or change in the jungle canopy. Where the hell did that come from?

Another buried vein of loss and longing; which outcrops above the dirt line in unexpected spots; which I randomly stumble across on my travels; which makes me wonder if I’m actually headed in the direction that I think my destination lies; which makes me wonder if I’ll be even half as satisfied as I hope once I actually arrive.

So, to those of you I’ve lost over the years, ‘out there in the dark and the noise’: goddammit, I miss you guys. To those of you who’ve kindly sent words to my inbox that remain unreplied: I’m sorry my blogging hypergraphia has nuked my correspondence lately. I know one is not a reasonable substitute for the other. And to those I haven’t lost quite yet, or maybe will never actually find: let’s try not to let go too soon. I know I’m a angry bear sometimes and a terrified sheep at others, and that the vacillating between the two can get exhausting. But I also think, hope, that averaged out over the long haul, I’m worth it. Maybe.