Oh the places we'll go! Oh the people we'll know!

I kept telling myself I didn't need to worry about shoveling the driveway, because January was coming, and in the second or third week of January it would thaw and melt all the snow away. I had better things to do, like visit swamps with boys. Nobody believed me. "But it's January! In Cleveland!" Yes, I know. And it's thawed at this time every year I can remember. Then I realized that my plan for this year should be to get a Farmers Almanac and track how often it is right. I should schedule my days off from work according to the Almanac, which is what, the collective wisdom of the ancient farming industry right? Don't they have prophets and oracles, deep inside a mountain in Wyoming, predicting these things for me? I have no idea where to even get an Almanac. I probably have to sacrifice a goat and three sheaves of barley, then reach into a black dimension with a special glove to pull one out. Or go to Wooster. Which is basically the same thing.


I want to live here, between the two empires. That is not a house, it's a covered bridge, but I would make it seem like home. I would hang paintings and doilies, and have a pot of something nice and suspect boiling on the stove. I would spend all day creating riddles to stump supplicants and gathering cattails for soap. See, I guess what I'm saying is, I want to be the nice ogre who lives under the bridge. Or the giant creepy nanny goat, whichever story you prefer.


This is a museum of the future. Meaning, it will be a museum, in the future, when train trestles and sewer lines seem as anachronous as the huge stone furnaces they built to make steel, or the canals that created state lines. Children will come here on field trips with parents, and stare at the rusting girders and think of pioneers with dirty hands and bad teeth and terrorizing steam engines and the dirty dirty waste disposal system at the beginning of the century. Then they will throw rocks at the frozen creek, to break the ice, and toss their gum at sleeping fishes and carve little pictures in rocks. They will get bored and cry to go back to their warm dormitories. Cause kids are ungrateful little shitheads.

Sewer mint green will someday again be a very fashionable color.

That electric pole is either about to, or never going to, fall down.