entries Archives - Boss Over Shoulder

The moon at daytime

The moon at daytime is a strange phenomenon when you think about it. But we see it because it’s there.

When I can’t make sense of present thoughts, I return to rewrites. On August 29, 2025, I wasn’t normally as capricious. I crave familiarity most of the time, and on other days, I reject it. But on this day, peace was not an afterthought. I did not dwell too long on daily preoccupations, like composing a text message or my route back home. I smiled at strangers. I availed myself to move on and stay put. My cup was full, but I did not spill my contents. I took a seat, drew a sigh, and sat down. Traffic on the interstate was steady like the breath. Beyond the highway and rolling hills, I stared into Pixar clouds against the backdrop of the azure sky. The air felt right, just like out west.

The moment was a gift. But I fumbled with two feeble arms receiving it.

Watching the daymoon float back as I drove toward its direction, dodging the same potholes I’ve memorized, I thought, couldn’t I imbue this elusive encounter rather than compare and contrast? Every song that played on my commute back home sounded splendid, so what was the catch? Everything felt aligned but illusory. The day’s fleeting minuscule qualities give credence for rejoicing in a rather rare occurrence, but what gives? Am I waiting for a moment’s passing to wistfully stare into what was? Did I bolt in an attempt to elude an impending disappointment because what goes up… must come down?

One has to be here to have this. So, land here. Gently.

I pulled into the driveway, entered the house, and sat down in my son’s room. Marbles, train tracks, cars, and books were strewn throughout. But I did not see a mess. I saw color.

Exteriorization

This Monday afternoon feels a lot like a Sunday evening. The streets are damp from rainfall. The rain’s slick attempt to assert itself without becoming a full tropical depression threw off my plans. Representing an inner state, clouds arrive and leave, and the asphalt is fragranced with petrichor. We are several days into rainy weather. I forgot how the sun looks suspended in the lofty azure. I took the dog out for a walk at 2:00 p.m., and the streets looked as though it were a quarter before seven. It is now 4:00 p.m., but it looks like 1 p.m. Just like the weather, I am confused. It has outdone itself in attempting to be everything. Recent changes distress me, and it will be only weeks until I recoil to familiarity.

Could you make yourself useful?

Lately, dense clouds that eventually disperse greet me on weekend mornings. They are neither portentious in color nor productive of any rainfall. If you stay, could you make yourself useful? I thought. They loiter, confabulating near my parked vehicle.

Typically, I enjoy the rain and the thought of it. I support the idea of precipitation and how the sky needs to release. I support everything related to it: thunder, dry lightning, puddled gutters, raindrops on window panes, the sound, wet bangs. But I could also reposition.

We are of space.

You feel stuck, unable to escape this body, but you get out of bed anyway. You are riddled with the same preoccupations, continue to do someone else’s job, and somehow get through the day to spill into the evening. You wonder if something will fall onto your lap as you are busy doing something else.

It’s been a dread dragging these feelings, sulking, paralyzed by overfelt emotions, reeling thoughts, and identities.

This evening, I read a book. I was exposed to words that weren’t my own, and was hit by a creative compulsion. I thought about these rainy days. I thought about integration. Then I delighted in feeling at all.

Are we not what happens to us?

Today, I feel distracted but aware. Stagnant and paralyzed by either thoughts or their absence. I suppose I am trying too hard to make things work, to make myself useful and good. I had a soul-enriching conversation the other day. I left the room elated, ready for any shadows lurking around the next corner. I felt proud. I hardly feel like that anymore. The default lately is listlessness. My willingness disappears before it even falls into the periphery. I asked someone the other day if we mistake melancholy for contentment. I knew they weren’t the same, but the somber, this suspension, seems not uncommon. I wake up to the emotion, faint in its appearance but apparent in its imposition, as it looks at me straight in the eye as though I must nurse it all day. I sweat the day’s efforts so I can marinate and soak up the dregs. The week wears me well. I reify the week’s emotional residue by emoting what this is I am experiencing, before I can allow myself to leave my desk.

Write anything. Write shit.

The day’s highlight: my son’s deliberate arrangement.

Write about the impermanence of worldly pleasures and pain. Write about new buildings, deforestation, and lavish getaways. Write about isolation. Write about squeezing yourself into a space that you don’t quite fit in. And how you oscillate, deciding how to perform, that you fold into yourself anyway.

I stare into boxes where I am shelved, but I don’t stare long. I nod at assumptions, without agreeing to them. I save the small talk and prepare for misunderstandings. I hear the familiar dial tone when we disconnect, and I still hear it when I hang up.

Through this evolution, we emulate ideas and identities, and become ourselves anyway. We wonder if we would be confronting the unconscious mind if we were to leave what isn’t serving us. We ask ourselves whether we are only allowing the good and not the whole in this lived experience. We shuffle through work and passions and misplace our values.

I am divided between seeking growth with caveats and authenticity and peace. Then I forget why I began in the first place. I remember where to find the exit door, yet my paralysis keeps me directionless.

We try to become and embody as much and as many as humanely as possible, and are reduced to feeling empty, frayed, and corroded.

Let October have this one.

The fall equinox found the best seat in the house. It entered the room with a pumpkin spice loaf and a hint of seasonal depression. I never know whether to grieve or celebrate its advent, deluded by its novelty that I know will peter out like the sounds of cicadas in June.

So, instead, I stare into trees and give them personalities. Some are impulsive for change, eager to return to dormancy, to shake off some excess. Others stand deeply rooted, skeptical, and say, “It’s not time yet,” after having been burned before.

I get it. Trusting cool, quiet mornings is hard when the days scorch you.

On their terms, leaves curl up and fall to the ground to decompose, so the trees could return what was given to them. Some lean into change, others stand tall and tower over smaller vegetation, envious of their evergreen equals.

What the rest of autumn lacks, the anticipation —the transition — the subtle interval holds: yellow school buses roaming through neighborhoods, kids idling at bus stops poring over their sneakers, and cars imbuing interstates and off-ramps. Mornings feel a lot different; sunsets have shifted a few degrees over, and crowds seem subdued.

These observational qualities of the impending season will fall tragically to a collection of oversights if not noticed. But if you listen, there is an exchange to be had.

The foliage inchoately turns ochre, yet too quickly for us to see, as preoccupations like football season and fall recipes pool at the forefront of our minds. Porch lights flip on a quarter before five, and gutters end up littered with sienna-colored leaves by December. To some, the seasonal shift feels like an old friend leaving you at the bottom of the escalators at LAX. To others, it’s a vacant terminal on a Christmas Eve dawn, greeted by that same companion.

But back home, the climate belies this one. There, the sun overstays its welcome on melancholic days, and autumn feels more like early spring. I think of my aging parents. I think of their brittle bodies. Mom’s salt and pepper gray fringe and deep red lipstick. Sisters, nieces, nephews, and old friends are aging twice as fast in a single year. The longer I’m away from home, the shorter the time it seems I have with them. It’s hard to be away; it’s harder to go back. The closer I am to finding solace, the further I am from my roots. Homemade adobo hits differently after a four-hour flight in recycled air, on top of years of unappreciation for its flavor profile or the love put into it.

If conversations I never had growing up were swept under the rug, then so much is being said now. Or I’m a better listener. If I dial down the noise and stop fidgeting, I will learn that these conversations were always had… through food, at overstimulating loud family gatherings, and through Mom’s sacrifices.

Several seasons ago, we cared too much; we held standards and grudges. Compared toys and the shapes of our thought patterns and professions. In this season of life, we hold our last bit of savings, feeling like a sell-out, and prefer silence over sound. We wallow in guilt-ridden drives home, thinking a phone call should be made. We miss people, even the Mazda driver we were following who just turned off on the last exit – thankful for their consistent and smooth braking patterns that made the dreadful commute tolerable. Have a nice life, I say.

I worry I’m a patchy correspondent, knowing I’m hardly a friend, and I’m running low on excuses, always blaming the ephemeral seasons.

The trees tell me to shake it off. The seasons call this the interim. Friends say it will pass. My son tells me without telling me to be in the present. But as I straddle the line between here and there and fact and fiction, these reductive interpretations feel like a wool turtleneck worn in 80-degree weather.

I blink. My eyelids fold in like an accordion, and I see my son, hailing proudly from his corner chair with yogurt in his hair and a marred iPad to his left. He cracks a grin, likely plotting trouble while I sit back and decide if he should have this one today.

On days like this, I’m seven years old, waiting for Mom, hoping she doesn’t work double. Dad’s still in Burbank, idling in ungodly traffic on the 101. I’m home, but homesick, with leftovers in the microwave, and the only light turned on in the house is the second-floor hallway. Still, a single digit number, blowing in game cartridges, repositioning the metal antenna on the kitchen television, and unaware that 30 years later, the home I grew up in would be torched to the ground.

Several seasons later, I’m 37, a weeping willow. My son, a palm tree exploding with sunshine. A spoon strikes the dining room table, and I wake from a nostalgic stupor. I tuck my ruminations under the pillow next to my favorite Polly Pocket. Feeling immensely overwhelmed by a barrage of notifications, boggled by when I subscribed to them. I clear them all in one sweep without having looked at them.

What will find me, will. What won’t, won’t.

I wipe my son’s hands, wondering how I’ll get through today. While I recall peers my age who’ve bolted from the idea of parenthood, I shift my focus to this resplendent creature before me, who I hope will never know what is truly going on.

I stare at trees hoping to understand the world around me, life, and family. I study weather patterns maybe too closely than the average person, thinking something is in the air, but there isn’t. I stare at strangers conversing, wondering if we are all just having conversations with ourselves. Is life a series of back-and-forths? Having too much time on our hands? Too many thoughts on our minds? saying something only to take it back? Are we just here for a good time? Not for a long time? I stand still in this seasonal cycle to understand my son and his bouts of dysregulation.

Let him have his season, I say. Then let him enter the next one.