<![CDATA[CHARLES PEARSON - CHARLES JOURNAL]]>

<![CDATA[CHARLES PEARSON - CHARLES JOURNAL]]>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 18:10:44 -0400Weebly<![CDATA["Full‑Body Honesty at Noon"]]>Sat, 15 Aug 2026 18:09:55 GMThttps://www.charles-pearson.com/charles-journal/full-body-honesty-at-noon

Main Street, downtown Village of Tarrytown

Figuring out train times for New York, Yonkers, or Poughkeepsie should be simple. There’s an app for everything now — schedules, alerts, maps. I download them, swear I’ll use them, and then delete them a week later. It’s easier to walk down to Peekskill Station, snap a photo of the timetable, and trust the image in my phone. Morning or afternoon, I know exactly when I need to be there.

On Friday — blistering, unreasonable heat — I found myself in Tarrytown. I’m still not sure what possessed me. Mostly I was there for an appointment with Dr. Joshua K., a baby‑faced man with fast‑blinking blue eyes and a gentle, attentive manner. His office sits a short walk from the station. If you’re not a walker, the cabs line up like obedient soldiers, or you can catch the #13 up White Plains Road to the Columbia Doctors building — a futuristic black‑glass structure that shows you all of yourself whether you’re ready or not.

The sunlight is merciless. The reflection even more so. You try not to look too hard — not out of dislike, just that quick flicker of wondering why you chose that outfit in such unforgiving light against your dark complexion. And then comes the inner terror we all know: Is that really me? Have I gotten that fat? That building doesn’t offer mercy; it offers full‑body honesty at noon. No more excessive pub drinking. No wonder a friend once said to you — rather harshly — When is the baby due? Disgusting, yes, but in that reflection the truth hits exactly where it hurts.

After my appointment — which I always enjoy for reasons I can’t quite name — I wandered toward a trail, an old aqueduct tucked into the middle of the village near Temple Beth Abraham, in a well kept, beautiful, lush neighborhood. I’ll be honest: I don’t understand these villages and hamlets at all. Growing up, a town was a town and a county was a county. Here, you step out of one place and you’re suddenly in another — White Plains, Sleepy Hollow, the Village of Tarrytown, the Village of Mount Pleasant, Greenburgh. The borders feel imaginary, like someone drew them in pencil and forgot to erase.

Still, Tarrytown is beautiful. I walked uphill through a quiet residential stretch toward White Plains Road, passing Washington Irving School and Christ Church, where an ivy vine once grew at Irving’s own Sunnyside residence. Downtown is lively, stylish, more boutique than Peekskill. From certain spots — perched high on its bluff — you can see the river and the bridge. I still call it the Tappan Zee, though it was renamed for a governor's father. That governor, the son and not the father, got booted a few years back, clearing the path for the current governor, a woman, to rise.

But honestly, the day was too hot for anything ambitious. Even so, I enjoyed the little I managed. Sometimes the middle of an adventure is the best place to start — no plan, no map, just the heat, the hills, and whatever the day decides to give you.

If you want, I can help you craft a closing line that echoes the title — something that ties the “honesty at noon” theme back into the wandering, the heat, and the self‑reckoning.

Village of Tarrytown

]]><![CDATA["Blossoms, Bees, and Balcony Botany"]]>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 11:35:03 GMThttps://www.charles-pearson.com/charles-journal/blossoms-bees-and-balcony-botany

Understanding cucumber plant yellow blossoms has taken on a brand‑new meaning for me. The scent they give off is incredibly sweet — almost enough to put you into a small state of euphoria. It’s strongest in the morning, which makes sense; nature designed it that way to catch the attention of bees the females need for pollination.

But do bees fly to a sixth‑floor balcony? I honestly don’t know. I haven’t paid much attention. Except…they must. I’ve cleaned up dead ones from the window sill where they flew into a closed pane, couldn’t get out, and died there. So yes, they must fly up to the sixth floor — doing their thing while I’m unaware.

I’ve learned the blossoms I’m seeing now are the male flowers. They appear first. Thin stems, no fruit at the base — their only job is to produce pollen. And they are producing it heavily. No wonder my allergies are out of whack. Even a crow visited the balcony, but I shooed him or her away because they were noisy and the way they eyed those yellow blossoms made me suspect they’d pluck them right off. I’ve even thought about using one of the Barbie dolls from Christmas as a scarecrow…but haven’t gotten around to that yet.

The female flowers come later. They have a small green swelling — the ovary — at the base. That’s where the fruit will develop if pollinated. At this point, I don’t see any females at all. Maybe I’ve created gay cucumber vines with beautiful yellow flowers, and there won’t be a single fruit this season.

And the smell — my God, the smell. Right now it’s drifting across the entire balcony and into the main room of the loft. A perfumed aroma, strong and sweet, almost intoxicating. It’s floral but not flowery, honeyed without being sugary — a kind of natural cologne the plant throws into the air. Enticing, bright, almost heady. You can smell it everywhere: across the balcony, through the open door, all the way to the dining table where I’m writing and sipping an espresso. It’s the kind of scent that makes you pause, breathe deeper, and feel oddly grateful for a plant that’s showing off.

No Ordinary Love

]]><![CDATA["Fans, Heat, Cucumbers, and Old Loves"]]>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:25:31 GMThttps://www.charles-pearson.com/charles-journal/fans-heat-cucumbers-and-old-loves

By the fan on a humid day, the wind is cool and nice against my skin. It’s been so hot in Peekskill it’s honestly best to stay home and write in the nude. Why not. You sweat better that way, and you don’t end up with a pile of damp clothes you’ll just have to wash when it’s easier to take a shower.

There is one good thing about all this heat and humidity: it forces you to change your diet. You start eating cooler, lighter, healthier things — partly because the heat makes you shed clothes, and what peeled off when you gasped at seeing yourself in the mirror makes you stop eating junk altogether. LOL. So that’s a good thing.

The cucumbers from the garden are excellent — crisp with a sweet tang that lingers in the mouth. It’s a good taste, a good feeling. I tried a recipe I saw online: sliced cucumbers turned into a German‑style salad with sour cream, mayo, crushed onions, garlic, parsley, and thyme. It became an excellent dill‑forward cucumber salad, the kind you want again the next day.

Then I made lentils — not for soup, but the way I remember the spicy lentils I loved so much at an Ethiopian restaurant I used to go to all the time in San Francisco. My friend, Jack, and I would go there often, and afterward it was Jack who taught me how to make spicy lentils the way they made them — among other things he taught me when I was sort of in love with him, probably because he had a ponytail and was the smartest computer guy I ever met.

That’s the thing about being a man — we fall in love too fast and out of love just as fast. But the memories stay, especially the ones tied to food, heat, and the people who drifted through our kitchens and our lives.

]]><![CDATA["Tractor Winds, River Fog, and Saturday Heat"]]>Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:50:00 GMThttps://www.charles-pearson.com/charles-journal/tractor-winds-river-fog-and-saturday-heat

I’m between takes today — laundry done, a small bit added to Painted People, and deeper into McBain’s Hark! than I meant to be. It’s one of those books you pick up for a chapter and suddenly you’re fifty pages in, wondering where the afternoon went.

Hardly anyone remembers summers hotter than the ones we have now, but I do — the ones on my grandfather’s farm in South Carolina. Most days I was lucky because I got to drive the tractor. I was a spoiled, privileged kind of child back then. The others were down in the rows doing the real work: picking corn or tobacco, loading it into the trailer behind me, and hauling it to the barn where workers strung the leaves on sticks. Those days were hot — blistering — but it didn’t feel quite as bad when I was driving down a row and the wind from the tractor hit my face. Still, it was freaking hot. The kind of heat where you sweat hard for no reason at all.

This morning started beautifully. Fog rolled over the river and the mountains in the distance, the kind of fog that looks like San Francisco wandered over just to say hello. I lingered by the water for hours, feeding scraps to a wild set of seagulls. A few Canadian geese tried to join in, but there’s no winning when seagulls are around — they take everything like it’s owed to them.

After the fog dissipated, the humidity settled in. The worst kind — the kind that wraps around you when you’re walking back up the hill to downtown. At one point I had to stop and sit at Abe Lincoln’s Lookout on South Street, trying not to think about the heat, the humidity, or much of anything else.

But it’s Saturday, and I’m okay. I’ve hit my goals, the City is just a train ride away, and if I head in this weekend, it’s the lively and colorful Dominican Day Parade in Midtown — the kind of celebration you shouldn’t miss. Walk the streets, feel the energy, and be happier simply because you’re in New York

Abraham Lincoln Lookout, South Street.

]]><![CDATA["Sofa Boys, Sugar Withdrawal, and Cooler Air"]]>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:25:42 GMThttps://www.charles-pearson.com/charles-journal/sofa-boys-sugar-withdrawal-and-cooler-air

A sexy boy who sometimes sleeps on your sofa — and occasionally in other places — thinks you want him all the time. In truth, you don’t. It’s perfectly possible to love someone without being intimate, and as you age you begin to prefer that kind of love: the quiet, companionable kind that doesn’t demand anything. Except on those rare occasions when passion arrives on its own terms — fitting, wordless, wonderful — and then disappears again without drama.

In other words, it’s perfectly fine to want connection for what it is — nothing more. No roles to play, no expectations, no talk of houses or marriage. Just two adults sharing a passionate moment and then going on with their lives. Be well tomorrow. Come back if you want. And if not soon, later is just fine — and for a writer, later is always fine… perhaps even better than sooner without commitments.

PPS is moving along. I’ve put down Penelope Douglas’s Five Brothers with all its raw details and switched to Hark! by Ed McBain, a murder mystery that feels far more enjoyable than being dragged through every tantalizing moment of someone else’s chaos.

It’s a cooler morning, thank God, unlike yesterday’s humidity — which was a horror show made worse by the fact that I was nursing a hangover. I’d gone to the riverfront where there was a band, good music, good people, drinks, and other things. I was happy and, yes, high. The next morning, I was no longer high, just sweaty and miserable in humidity thick enough to chew.

Other than that, I’m okay. I plan to finish my goals today and maybe see the City this weekend — wandering its streets until I feel happier, simply because I’m in New York, and there’s nowhere quite like it. Except maybe Peekskill. I like it here...

The Riverfront - Peekskill on the Hudson

]]><![CDATA["Sugarless Morning, Balcony Agriculture, and AI Panic"]]>Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:23:32 GMThttps://www.charles-pearson.com/charles-journal/sugarless-morning-balcony-agriculture-and-ai-panic

Cutting back on sugar, eating healthier, and staying active means enjoying longer walks along the beach—or rather, the riverfront of Peekskill, which resembles a rocky beach on the Hudson.

I’ve been reading some horrible takes about AI and writers lately — the usual panic about machines replacing creativity. But they always skip the obvious part: if a writer expects AI to write the whole thing, then yes, that’s AI, not the writer. Using AI as a tool — an editor, a second pair of eyes — is absolutely fine. As long as the piece is your own, it’s your work. The New York Times had an opinion piece about this, and while I didn’t agree with all of it, I do know this: today’s blog is mine. Completely mine. LOL.

The bush beans (string beans, if you’re old‑school) have finally grown in and are ready to pick if I want them green. Cucumber blossoms are lighting up the balcony like tiny yellow lanterns, and they’ll turn into actual cucumbers this week or next. The tomato plants keep shooting upward — twenty‑one inches now, nearly two feet — but no blossoms yet. They’re still thinking about adulthood.

The cool morning here is wonderful. I’ve cut back on sugar to the point of eliminating it entirely, except for whatever stray gram sneaks into store‑bought things. Those offenders have been tossed into the basement bin for trash or whoever wants them.

My energy is slowly returning, but without sugar giving me that instant high, I’m a little fatigued while my body tries to figure out what the hell is happening. It’s like it’s filing a complaint with HR.

One martini is okay. No sugar at all if you stick to the Classic. One martini is only 120 calories, which is ideal — and the best part is you don’t end up having three of them or waking up under the host for real or in your imagination.

JUST DO IT

]]><![CDATA["Friday Drift"]]>Fri, 31 Jul 2026 23:27:37 GMThttps://www.charles-pearson.com/charles-journal/friday-drift

People are basically friendly everywhere I go. Even Dallas — where I once had such a good time on Oak Lawn and Cedar Springs Road in a leather bar that I briefly considered never coming back. My heart still belonged to San Francisco then, though, and to a blond then named Paul who’d already escaped back to Texas. He’s more or less the blueprint for Travis Weatherford in Painted People, if I ever finish the thing before I’m ninety.

San Francisco still tugs at me, but if you stay anywhere long enough — even the backwoods of South Carolina — you eventually start liking the place. Your heart adjusts. It’s very adaptable, like a houseplant that refuses to die.

I spent most of today being a tourist. Bought a chunk of turkey breast at I & J Fresh Market. The woman at the counter told me their Bronx store is “complicated and insane,” which is exactly how I remember the Bronx when I almost moved there. Peekskill took me first, and here I am.

I’m reading Five Brothers by Penelope Douglas — a book so wild it makes Jacqueline Susann look like a church pamphlet. I read Susann as a teenager and thought I was learning about adulthood. Turns out I was just learning how dramatic people can be.

Later I walked down shady Requa Street toward the train station and sat by the water watching Canadian geese conduct whatever business geese conduct. A fisherman and his daughter tried their luck. A man with a cart blasted music. More men arrived with boats and launched them into a river that had spilled into the parking lot like it paid rent there.

A simple Friday. A little chaos, a little nostalgia, and the geese judging everyone.

]]><![CDATA["The Strange Fact of Being Here"]]>Thu, 30 Jul 2026 09:26:24 GMThttps://www.charles-pearson.com/charles-journal/the-strange-fact-of-being-here

There are mornings when the world feels heavier, not because anything catastrophic has happened, but because the mind has been busy wandering through the deep corridors — the ones philosophers spend their whole lives pacing. Today is one of those mornings.

I keep circling this idea: there has to be a creator. Not in the neat, packaged way religion sometimes tries to hand us, but in the simple, unavoidable logic of existence. Something started this. Something set the conditions. Something — or some process — brought forth the chain that led to me, sitting here, thinking about beginnings.

We know our parents created us. And their parents created them. And so on, back through time, through migrations, through accidents, through choices, through love, through pain. A chain of origins stretching so far back it becomes mythic. At some point, you have to ask: Does the chain ever end? Or is the idea of a “first beginning” just another human attempt to make mystery manageable.

Maybe there was a beginning. Maybe there wasn’t. Maybe “beginning” is the wrong word for whatever happened.

The book I’m reading dropped a sentence that’s been echoing in me: “We experience ourselves as posited, yet also as independent.”

That’s the tension, isn’t it? We are placed here — posited — by forces we didn’t choose. Yet we also walk around with this fierce sense of independence, free will, autonomy, the ability to shape our days and our futures. We are both authored and self‑authored. Both dependent and defiantly free.

And maybe that’s why life feels like a permanent tug‑of‑war. We’re always pulled back toward our origin — not just biologically, but existentially. The origin bears us, shapes us, whispers through us. Even when we rebel against it, we’re still tethered to it.

Just by being born, we become involved with having to die. And death, in its strange way, is the return — the closing of the loop, the necessary step back toward whatever that origin really is. Not in a morbid way, but in a structural way. Birth and death are the two ends of the same doorway.

This morning, I’m sitting with that tension. The weight of being both created and free. The mystery of beginnings that may not be beginnings at all. The quiet truth that we are always returning, even as we move forward.

And somehow, that makes the day feel a little more meaningful — heavy, yes, but meaningful.

]]><![CDATA["Regeneration Uses"]]>Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:17:23 GMThttps://www.charles-pearson.com/charles-journal/regeneration-uses

“Where one place fades, another grows — regeneration in all its uses.”

I’ve been studying socialism — not because I’m a socialist, but because Democratic Socialists keep showing up in the news. I want to understand what they actually believe, how they differ from traditional socialism, and where the overlap is. One more book is on its way from another library; Field Library says it should arrive today or Saturday. As always, I remind myself to confirm political information with trusted sources.

The nights have finally cooled again — temperatures back in the 50s. I sleep better when the air is cold. It matches my warm heart, I suppose. No tossing, no sweating, no sticky dreams. Though my dreams have been strange lately: Joel, the Jewish man I once loved who lived under Mt. Davidson; my mother making chicken salad and me telling her it was good because the way she made it is better than anyone else's since she's your mother; my San Francisco dog, Jackson, staring at me; my cats, Jake and Etta McGee, greeting me in a living room that doesn’t exist anymore.

Today feels important. Don’t ask me why. I just have that sense — that something meaningful will happen, directly or indirectly, for all of us.

Peekskill Regeneration Farm was lush in the early sunlight. Lettuce crisp and bright. Kale and cabbage standing proud. Jalapeños shining like little green bullets. Squash blossoms everywhere. Green tomatoes plump and almost ready. Apples filling the trees. Sunflowers rising with the day. The workers have done an outstanding job — the kind of work my grandfather would have admired. He loved farming more than anyone I’ve ever known. Before the sun came up, he was already in the field tending to his gardens and cash crops, moving through the rows like a man in prayer.

Walking through the farm this morning, I realized the name is perfect: regeneration. Not just for the soil, but for the mind. For the uses we make of our days. Studying political systems, revisiting old dreams, watching new growth push through the earth — it’s all the same cycle. Something ends, something begins, something returns in a different form.

It’s Friday the 24th — just three days before the end of Birdsall House and its beautiful beer garden. One place fading, another place rising. Uses shifting. Regeneration everywhere.

Peekskill Regeneration Farm at Lapore Park on John /Street between Decatur Avenue and Hadden Street

]]><![CDATA["A Morning of Nothing, and Everything"]]>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:40:51 GMThttps://www.charles-pearson.com/charles-journal/a-morning-of-nothing-and-everything

Sometimes I don’t want to write anymore. It’s embarrassing to admit, given how much of my life is built around the ritual of sitting down and shaping words, but there it is. My editor tore apart a long, grueling chapter I’d written — a chapter I thought had marrow in it — and the critique sucked whatever life I believed I had right out of me. On mornings like that, watching a maintenance worker water flowers feels far more exciting than anything happening on the page.

And then, as it always does, memory arrives uninvited. This time last year was heavy with a sadness I still don’t like to look at directly. The heart aches in its own stubborn way, especially when the person you cared for most — your own mother — dies and leaves you standing in the world a little more alone than you expected to be.

But today, after wandering around town in the AM, I felt something shift. Maybe not dramatically, but enough. Enough to think: Alright. Enough daily logs. Enough picture-taking. Enough Monology Go! Let’s get back to fiction. Something has to give, and maybe it’s time for Painted People to stop waiting for me to feel brave.

Still, the morning had its small pleasures. I needed to mail a letter and had only one stamp, so I walked up the steps from Central to Peekskill’s impressive post office — that 1930–1931 neoclassical brick beauty with its arches and limestone trim. I thought I’d breeze in, hand the letter to the postmaster, and be done. Instead, there were six people ahead of me and only one window open. The rest were closed, as usual, casualties of staff shortages and budget cuts. A typical American post office scene, but somehow still comforting in its predictability.

Back down South Street, I browsed a few books at Field Bookstore, then hurried off to my next appointment. A typical day, I suppose, for a person who writes and procrastinates but eventually writes — wandering through “Our Town of Peekskill” as it slowly woke up. People going about their business. School kids waiting for buses. The quiet choreography of a town stretching into its morning.

I ran into Patrick from Whiskey River, walking with his daughter. He wished me a good day. I wished him one back. Then I moved along to meet the guy I was supposed to meet, and that was my boring morning.

Though strangely enough, I was happy — happy to be free of so many things, even if only for a few hours. Happy to feel the faint tug of fiction calling me back. Happy to remember that even a day of “nothing happening” can still be a day worth writing down.

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