A close up from far away picture of a blue bumper sticker urging separation of church and state below a silver license plate holder

I think an under-attempted party game is taking a picture of a car with multiple bumper stickers and logos and reverse engineering a personality from a series of quotes. One could offer or solicit extra points depending on contextual clues like location, time of day and direction.

A full moon over an apartment building, seen across a nighttime parking lot from an apartment building’s balcony

Even hanging out behind a stream of high clouds, the moon’s light managed to fill the living room with a silvery and faint glow. Then I noticed the cloud that looked like a perfectly round circle and thought, that’s odd, I could stare at that until I was really late to work, and the thought suddenly seemed so pleasant that I immediately took a picture and turned away from it toward my front door.

I had to work, but I still had absolutely no business wandering through the late 20th and early 21st century, but a flea market presents you with few other options. There you are, shaking your hands to get rid of vintage goods and vinyl albums that leap toward you like bad special effects noises, jumpcutting into the fancy leather satchel that whispers how much it could hold if you just bought it too, with its enabling-ass cow-clad craftiness.

The parking lot of a suburban hardware store with several parking spaces, including one occupied by an SUV with a customized license plate.

When you figure out the small needful thing with help from a random instructional video, you wonder if the rest of everything else can be similarly broken down. What happens if I wander in here and ask about such and such? Let’s see, I can use these few free minutes to finish off this memoir and return some library books, cutting bait on two I didn’t get around to in time. Scary mode, activated.

The better of two blank gray similar images, as judged by an algorithm somewhere aboard my phone camera’s image processing system

Things got weird when I switched up one of my guitars’ tunings (FACGAD, as I got distracted by the sound before I could tune up that last string to E. The next thing I knew, I had five new songs on the pile. Between these new arrivals and the ones from the first two months, I should probably make some decisions about a couple of releases in a little over two weeks.

A long stretch of city street with cars and a bicycle alongside low brick buildings under partly sunny sky

The cure for too long (really, almost any length of time) at a desk is to get up, walk away and get a lap of at least a few blocks in, stopping to smile, say hello and gossip with a random stranger, be most about a business while patronizing it for a necessary item, exercising both minor moderation and magnanimity with a midday meal, and then bobbing sedately along when a car with an extraordinarily loud sound system playing something inane but not shockingly rude or off color.

Another sunset low on the horizon behind slightly angled vertical blinds

With plenty of distractions to choose from, it’s surprising I chose the one involving the engineer for an album. After my language duties. It meant I was interruptible for the hour I actually spent at my other long neglected desk, but there are worse ways to be taken off task.

A person’s left hand holding a slim blue vinyl booklet in a low lit room with lightly open blinds

So the season turned, and I thought about freedom and I got home. There it was, later than it should have been because of my own failure to sign where I should have, but still on a time of its own. No plans yet, but maybe in three months and again in six, it could happen.

An automated speed sign is blank with unlit slow down words within its housing on a pole next to a curved and downhill sloping city street.

The reception was bad for all the usual reasons, the infrastructure wasn’t there, the street layout was odd and the hill likely played hob with signals. Not to mention, I needed things to work so I could be present where others had been and now weren’t. But it was what it was.

Sunset light shines through a clear window, casting three bright squares against a darkened wall in an apartment hallway

There was enough going on to keep me busy. I didn’t have to go all the way over to the other side but I expect that will happen tomorrow. Just enough winter left, even on a sunny weekend, to send a chill where you don’t want it to go, much less feel.