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2 weeks ago | 
sergebielanko.substack.com | Serge Bielanko
It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was. - Anne Sexton_____jawn one. Maybe it’s because I ended up without a dad of my own that I became a keen observer of other people’s dads. It’s a thing that continues to this day. My favorite is spotting older men with their grown up sons and daughters. I sit on my car bumper at the flea market sometimes and seek them out with my eyes and my brain.
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3 weeks ago | 
sergebielanko.substack.com | Serge Bielanko
If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you. - Leo Tolstoy_____jawn one. I saw a watersnake looking at me. He was small, but he was still and staring right at me. That alone was enough to change my day.
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4 weeks ago | 
sergebielanko.substack.com | Serge Bielanko
A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know. -Diane ArbusWe did a tour. It was long ago now, before I had three kids. I had two then. And in the picture I have from the day we were leaving, they are in my arms, sagging in my grasp. It is a photo I hadn’t seen in such a while that I had forgotten it existed. With photographs you either are looking at them or you aren’t. And if you aren’t, then the memory is probably faded or even gone.
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1 month ago | 
sergebielanko.substack.com | Serge Bielanko
When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf. - Cormac McCarthy, Blood MeridianBy the recycling dumpsters down in Centre Hall, I am pushing a trash bag of cans into a dark space when I hear the goats. They make goat sounds from across the big road, from their pen in a small field behind the Dunkin’ Donuts, and I hear them and I stop what I’m up to. Many, many years ago, I tell myself, I was a dirt farmer in a far off land.
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1 month ago | 
sergebielanko.substack.com | Serge Bielanko
Yesterday on the later side of the evening, I was sitting in the back door listening to Billie Holiday. I had no booze in me and none in a glass. I had eaten a bunch of cheeseburger quesadillas I made for the kids and I was feeling like a statue. I needed to sit down with my art. The evening was half decent/ warm, I guess/ but it could have stormed. Things were sunny and gray at the same time. Sometimes the sky is both. Sometimes I’m both, too.
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1 month ago | 
sergebielanko.substack.com | Serge Bielanko
jawn /jôn/ noun - (chiefly in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area) used to refer to a thing, place, person, or event that one need not or cannot give a specific name to. Jawn is a neutral, all-purpose noun used to reference any person, place, situation, or object. In casual conversation, it takes the place of the word ‘thing’. _____jawn one. My hair in the front is thinning outpretty fast. Ilook in the mirror, see my scalp at times; it’s yet another surreal reminder that I am dying.
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2 months ago | 
sergebielanko.substack.com | Serge Bielanko
At the farm pond last Saturday evening. It was a hot spring day today and now I’m watching Henry throw a buzzbait up against the bank. His casts are almost all pinpoint accurate. He lays the lure down where the water runs up into the cut reeds; he starts reeling before it even lands, just like I taught him. A largemouth slaps at Henry’s offering/ we both watch the V in the water where its dorsal fin approaches like a shark keying in on a seal. There’s not much difference.
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2 months ago | 
sergebielanko.substack.com | Serge Bielanko
Well, it ought to be easy, it ought to be simple enoughMan meets a woman and they fall in loveBut this house is haunted and the ride gets roughYou've got to learn to live with what you can't rise aboveIf you want to ride on down, down in through this tunnel of love. - Bruce Springsteen, ‘Tunnel of Love’Arle stands at our kitchen sink with her phone pointed at the lake on side one.
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2 months ago | 
sergebielanko.substack.com | Serge Bielanko
Morning calls. The stretch of the rubber band strains a bit tighter from where it’s anchored by a nail in the board way back at the dawn of man. It comes my way across all that has occurred before now, only to end up wrapped, tight as a fiddle string, around this cup of coffee I’m pouring myself here in the early kitchen. In my own way, I try to makes sense of another day, another one of these impossible sets of hours and rules and payments.
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Mar 28, 2025 | 
sergebielanko.substack.com | Serge Bielanko
Every town has an Elm Street. -Freddie KruegerThere are these things called night terrors. They mostly happen in little kids under the age of 12 and that doesn’t seem fair to me. Little kids don’t deserve anything like that. What happens (on the surface of things) is that the kid is asleep but then suddenly they are also talking excitedly or screaming or calling for help. They might be understandable or they might be incomprehensible.