Another finish line, another starting gate

And so, after yesterday’s “Arrhythmic Poem,” I stagger to the finish line of a sixth year of daily blogging. I did not sense, and could not have known, that when I resolved to post something every day for three months, I finally stumbled onto a way to establish a writing habit that involved producing daily, which I have now done since Aug. 1, 2020. 

The first day of August has become a watershed day of sorts for me. It was around Aug. 1, 1997, that I met in person the woman I’d been talking with by phone since she contacted me in hopes of giving away her vinyl records. On Aug. 1, 2002, I sat down at the editor’s desk of the venerable Door County Advocate for the first time. (Someday I hope to make sense of the journey I took with that historic newspaper, from assuming stewardship of an esteemed family business to being jettisoned by corporate vultures picking at the bones — but I digress.)

It was on or about Aug. 1, 2012, that Red and I moved into our newly completed home not far from the waters of Green Bay, and it was Aug. 1, 2020, that I started a daily habit at WarrenBluhm.com.

This is the first of those six years in which I did not publish a book or two. My portfolio as of Aug. 1, 2020, included four collections of bloggy thoughts and three works of fiction. Since that day I have published six more collections and three and one-third more imaginary tales. But the latest publication, See the World!, appeared June 11, 2025. I have no clear explanation for the pause.

Three life-altering events occurred during those six years. The first was the loss of Willow The Best Dog There Is™, who shared a remarkable bond with me for 12 years. I was concerned that something was wrong with me, that my grief for a golden retriever felt deeper than the loss of precious humans in my life. But then my beloved Red grew ill and passed in the most horrific six months of my life, and I understood true grief. And then after 19 desolate months, a big little woman stepped up and into my life. God sent Mary to remind me life goes on even after the greatest devastation.

Red’s death gave me a mission statement — the last words I read to her in the hospice room: Love God, and love your neighbor.

As we embark on a seventh year of these daily visits, it’s good to reflect and renew mission statements and to refresh and remind one’s self about meaning and purpose. I reach another finish line and walk into another starting gate, and the race resumes all over again for another lap.

Is Aug. 1, 2026, to be another milestone or simply another anniversary? I don’t anticipate any life-changing events, but our lives change without warning sometimes. We shall see.

Arrhythmic Poem

I know where the four winds blow. I raise my sail to catch the way I want to go. “Slow,” I says to myself, “go slow,” but my soul wants to fly, I’m not quite sure why — probably because time rushes so.

And if I sit here too long, will I turn to stone? Will I die right here, stock still and all alone? Have I always been a child, or have I grown? The day is creeping past, and I feel out of gas. Have I seen all that this day might have shown?

It feels dumb to sit here, grasping for a rhyme. It’s not as if I do this all the time, and wasting precious moments seems a crime. Yet it’s more than I’ve attempted before, so maybe this is part of the design.

And so I mumble further down the page, hoping now I finally break out of the cage in search of cures for everybody’s rage. I know it’s probably futile, the world is far too brutal, but dreams might usher in a peaceful age.

The second guess

Warren and Onyah in a past life

If I could do it over again — if I could go back in time — if I had said what was on my mind before I went through with it — If I had just shut up that time — 

There’s a new Spider-Man movie coming out this week. One of Marvel’s themes in recent years has been alternate universes — somewhere in another dimension is a “you” and a “me” who made a different choice at key moments in our lives: took that one job or refused it, married that person or decided to cancel the wedding, that sort of thing.

In the last film they took clever advantage of the fact that three different actors have portrayed Spider-Man in the movies, by crafting a story where all three Peter Parkers were real, just in different universes, and they worked together. 

It’s fun imagining “What if,” except when it isn’t, when we sink into wondering if our lives would be better now if we had made a different decision back then. Let’s cut to the bottom line: You can’t change your past decisions, and it’s a waste of time, energy and emotion to guess what the outcome would have been.

Yesterday is etched in stone, and tomorrow is never exactly what we imagined it to be. The only thing we can control is today, this very moment, right now. 

Our best option is to pay attention today, this very moment, right now, and make the choices that seem right and proper in this present moment. Rather than brooding about past decisions, we can incorporate what we learned back then into making this moment the best version of reality we can muster.

All we have is this universe. Even if there are alternate universes, this is the one we’re living in, and it’s very unlikely we’ll ever get a peek into those other worlds. So let’s make the most of this one.