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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I didn’t leave the house, didn’t see the movie I’d wanted to see, didn’t do several other things, and it was just as well. It was one of those days where no one should have left the house. Least of all, the people who did and then didn’t get to go home.

Now, let’s see if I get as good a sleep time as I remember getting a couple of years ago. There’s nothing like when the right kind of technology arrives, landing outside your door on your way out to do something else. I’d say the price was right, but decent sleep is pretty much priceless.

Start slow and you leave yourself at the mercy of other slow people in front of you, dawdling on the way to places they don’t want to go, and keeping you from places you do. Start faster so at least you can get up some momentum and traction toward people and places.

No matter how gentle the slope or how well manicured the neighborhood, every hill in this city feels like violence at speed, more the geologic time that formed it rather than the civilized society that trapped portions of it under tarmac and concrete.

You won’t go from pillar to post every day, so you try to get things done while it’s still even if you don’t feel still. Make the calls, carry out the stretches, mutter under your breath and mark it a midweek.