We Can’t Stop or We’ll Stop

Barton Springs Early Morning Swim Report 2/13/2025

In the 30s this morning, impressionistic moon behind an impasto of clouds. Last night I went to an excellent student reading and came out and saw a beautiful moon and said (in my head), See you tomorrow. When I walked out in the dark this morning, it was overcast, and I looked up and saw a glow and willed the clouds to disperse. They did, a little.

I don’t actually think I changed reality with the power of my mind, I should make clear. I remain reality-based. Perhaps we who remain reality-based in this country should wear t-shirts that say so.

I have been swimming but not writing. I have swum in gold-rimmed daylight and in concrete mornings, in the dark and in light I can only call Cream of Wheat, in misty rain. I take pictures sometimes, though only if I remember to bring my smartphone, which I generally don’t. At least, I try not to. I do have some fine footage from a couple of weeks ago of the sunlight after my swim, gilding the goslings.

One morning I arrived early to see an EMS vehicle—more than a golf cart, less than a car—was parked at the gate. I worried, but once I got to the pool itself I understood this was some sort of training activity. Across the pool I heard somebody yell, “Sprint like you want to be here!”

I do want to be here, I thought. Ssshhh.

There was a fair amount of yelling and people swimming about. At one point I worried that I would be rescued against my will. When I left a woman was looking nervously at a bunch of ambulances that had arrived while I’d been in the pool.

“Training,” I told her, and she clutched her chest in relief.

We look for good news where we can find it, to deliver and to receive. I’ve just spent a long stretch of time immersed in two things: applications to MFA programs, and culture. The MFA applications are ongoing. In the old days, I used to tweet every now and then about the process—nothing specific or identifiable, just remarking on trends in tense or narrative or subject matter—and then somebody told me that this distressed people in various private groups who had applied to MFA programs. I didn’t want to distress people, especially people in suspense, so I stopped.

(By the way, friends: don’t use AI to research writing programs. It makes mistakes no human would make, just as humans make mistakes—interesting mistakes—no code can achieve.)

I’ve seen plays and movies, music, museums. I saw Rickie Lee Jones, and Lili Taylor and Suzanne Bocanegra. I’m a constitutional audience member. I find it helpful. I cannot change reality with the power of my thoughts—though I do think I’d do a good job, at least in some arenas—but art of various sorts do cheer up my local reality, even though the news is so glum. I had hoped that the lesson of a pandemic that killed many people would be that lethal pandemics are bad, as opposed to something invite into our houses to embrace.

A few other things I’ve overheard at the pool:

A man on the deck saying, “A raccoon stole one of my shoes.” (I asked him about it. “It was a flip-flop,” he said. “He was teasing me. I don’t know if he smelled food on it—it had been in my bag.”)

A woman shouting back to her slower male companion, “I can’t stop or I’ll stop.”

A noise from the woods like a creaking door, tree or insect or bird.

“Bro! Bro! Bro!”