journal entry
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Fiji, 1980s. The sun’s a smug bastard, grinning down, reminding me it’s summer here while Los Angeles shivers. Waves lap at the shore, warm as a lover’s whisper, every thirty seconds or so. I’m eighteen, cocky, standing in nemo-print trunks—pre-movie, mind you, maybe I inspired Pixar. Signed up for this swim-snorkel-underwater-cave deal. Sounded like a…
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Prompt: Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently? Financial decisions come to mind. A relationship I held onto longer than I should have. Another I didn’t jump into when the moment opened. Business opportunities I let pass. All of it. Each choice—or lack of…
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What Makes Me Nervous? Oh, Just the End of the World as We Know It As a construction business owner with a few degrees under my hardhat, I’m no stranger to stress. But when I read headlines screaming, “DOW headed for worst April since the Great Depression—yes, that 1932 debacle, not the Great Recession we…
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How do I unwind after a demanding day? I sit.I breathe.And sometimes—I remember. Back in 2008, when the Great Recession was battering my business and life felt like it was unraveling one invoice at a time, I developed a small ritual. After a long day—clients yelling, banks circling, friends and subcontractors losing homes—I’d pull into…
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I use social media the way I use salt-just enough to taste, never enough to live on. bb grey It’s Easter Sunday. I was woken not by an alarm, but by a quartet of birds playing something between a minuet and a dream—somewhere between Debussy and the dripping hush of a new morning. It’s easy…
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I woke with a hymnhalf-formed on my tongue—Stricken, smitten, and afflicted—the kind of song that burrowsinto the folds of a child’s memory,etched deeper by dim lights and heavy ritualsin a Lutheran church that never smiled on Good Friday. We sang it every year,never once on any other day.And though it sounded like mourning,we were expected…
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“Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt”― Seth Godin, The Dip Knowing when to quit. I’ll never forget stumbling across Seth Godin’s book, The Dip, and hitting a line that stopped me cold: “Some of the most successful people are the best quitters.” My brain did a double-take. Growing up with immigrant parents who…
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“We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.”— W. Somerset Maugham Your silence cuts like glass,a delayed reply, a shrug that stings.I wrote you truth, raw and jagged,to mend the cracks where our story…
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Billie Holiday cries softly, somewhere between here and the past—her melody warms the corners of the roomlike the heater humming in time with my breath.A cappuccino cozies the center of me,and I write—to life,to you,across this ethereal threadspun of digits and light. I weave thoughts and feelingslike a tapestry—yarns pulled from memory and moment:scratchy and…
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Music prompt mind, Six months in a leaky boat. Cruising down the freeway—feeling that fleeting “free” way vibe—I had Split Enz’s “Six Months in a Leaky Boat” blasting through my speakers. The wind was whipping, the lyrics were hitting, but as usual, my brain played its favorite game: swapping out half-heard words for whatever nonsense…
BB Grey--musings 