The Good Daydreams

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 07:46:58 -0500

Monday through Wednesday
gave us the patio version
of exactly enough.
Orca tumbling around
with all sixteen weeks
of her giant miniature confidence.
Coal holding court
with eleven years
of black-lab wisdom
and the kind of sigh
that says:
I have seen puppies before.
NBA on.
NHL on.
The evenings doing
that easy little thing
where nothing dramatic happens
and somehow
everything feels placed
exactly where it belongs.
You.
Me.
The dogs.
The patio.
Games filling the edges
while the middle
stayed soft.
Wednesday night, (damn, girl)
you put Mr. “For Dog’s Sake” on notice.
Really put him there.
Held the line
with the kind of clarity
I wish the water bowls had gotten sooner.
And maybe it landed.
Thursday,
he came back clean.
Thoroughly apologetic.
Not just to me,
but to some others
he’d wronged along the way.
I hope it matters.
I hope it becomes a real turn,
not just a scared apology after impact.
For his sake.
For everybody’s.
It’s gonna be a while
before trust
knows where to sit
in that room again.
But a start
is a start.
Meanwhile,
your Thursday got tangled
in one of those time crunches
that eats the good part
right off the calendar.
So you didn’t make it
to Irby’s patio
for that one.
Friday came,
another day
swallowed by the schedule.
Orca and I held it down.
Not the same.
Still sweet.
’Cause we met Riley and Bear
for the first time
that won’t be the last time.
Eight-pound Orca.
Eighty-pound Riley.
Best friends
from the jump.
Bear standing back,
trying to figure out
how to be a dog that big.
And still,
the phone kept doing
its tiny mercy:
*ding*.
A little thread-light.
A little Friday-you
arriving in pieces,
enough to make the patio
not empty,
not exactly full.
Still…
missing the obvious ingredient.
And now—
Saturday morning is here,
doing that rude little thing
where the sun comes up…
like it didn’t notice
I miss you like crazy.
Two days apart
is nothing for us.
We’ve done distance.
We’ve done flights.
We’ve done time zones,
delays,
whole cities,
whole states,
whole _countries_,
getting in the way.
But two days
is still two days
when it’s the two days
between me and your smile,
your voice,
your hug,
your you.
That’s the part
the calendar
keeps failing to understand.
Tomorrow,
you’ll watch Orca
while I do the Braves game
with King Ron and the Northside boys.
Which is kind.
Which helps.
Which is also
just enough of you
to be a tease.
Monday,
if the universe can manage
not to trip over itself,
should be cuddle time.
Finally.
Until then,
I’ll take what I can get.
The memory
of patio nights.
The sound
of both dogs settling.
The way you make
a normal week
feel like it has
somewhere better to go.
And if I can’t have
the smile,
the voice,
the hug,
the you…
then fine.
I’ll hope
for a _lot_
of the good daydreams.

For Dog’s Sake

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:34:18 -0500

Monday,
somewhere around five,
Mari sent a message from my condo:
"Um,
don’t wanna snitch,
but the condo is a bit,
umm."
"I hope he cleans it up
before you get here."
That was it.
No details.
No photographic evidence.
No severity rating.
Just enough information
to let my brain
open a ticket
and spend the entire night escalating it.
Here’s the thing:
I was supposed to be there.
Same day.
Same time.
I was supposed to walk
through that door
after Montreal,
drop my bag,
scratch Coal,
and let the whole
travel circus
finally power down.
Instead,
Bonus Lap sent me
directly to Fort Worth,
which meant Mari
had to pick up Mr. C
without me.
Which meant she saw it.
Like that.
And “like that,”
as I later learned,
had a blast radius.
And the hardest part to swallow?
This wasn’t some random kid off an app.
This was a guy I thought was for real.
An Atlanta friend—
Someone you hand the keys to
and don't think twice.
Instead, I handed the keys
to a cokehead on a bender
who later told me,
with his whole chest,
that he "lost a whole day."
Lost a day.
Like it fell behind the couch cushion.
Like that makes it better.
Every drop of alcohol: gone.
Every towel in the house:
on the floor,
for reasons still under investigation.
Hair: everywhere.
Layers of it.
The condo wearing
an entirely new coat
I didn’t order.
My brand-new speakers:
dropped,
damaged,
put back upside down.
(apparently gravity is hard on a bender)
The Smithey pots: rusted.
The Shun knives: rusted.
My bed: stripped.
Washer: full of his shit.
Dryer: also full
of
his
shit.
And the dogs?
No water.
God knows for how long.
That's where the jokes stop.
That's where the grace period ends.
For dog’s sake.
You can ruin my pans.
You can drink my bourbon.
You can rearrange my electronics
like a tweaked-out interior designer.
But don't you mess with the animals.
The rest of it is stuff.
Expensive stuff.
Annoying stuff.
Stuff I have spent
the whole weekend
and a few pennies
cleaning,
washing,
scrubbing,
restoring,
replacing.
The condo is barely presentable again.
The alcohol cabinet has been repurchased.
The towels have returned
from whatever terrible meeting
they were holding on the floor.
The pots and knives are in recovery.
The speakers are upright,
which should not feel
like an accomplishment,
but here we are.
C/D: Condo Destruction.
Incident response
with laundry detergent,
steel wool,
and the kind of language
usually reserved
for production outages
and very specific airport delays.
Scrubbing someone else's bad decisions
out of my floorboards
just so I could welcome company
into a home that didn't feel
like a crime scene.
I almost let his lost day
ruin my real one.
Then,
because apparently
the postmortem
was not complete,
I opened the freezer.
Handel’s.
Every bit of it.
Gone.
All of it.
Not the worst thing.
Not even close.
Just the final little alert
after the system
was already on fire.
The tiny frozen footnote
that finally made me
say it out loud:
What
the fucking
fuck?
(sorry, Mr C)

Coal on Bougyman's Ramblings

The Good Daydreams

For Dog’s Sake