The Bare Quiet Places are Great

So I think my excuse for this past week is going to be that it was the very last winter week, and winter basically broke me in the end. I drank too much. I behaved like I was 22. It was either one of my worst weeks in a while, or one of my best, it's sort of up in the air. Point is, right, Spring.



Usually Jere is a little picky about where we go on Mondays. He wants it to be an adventure for sure, he doesn't like being stuck in the car with no purpose. I like no purpose. Maybe just a vague idea, like a direction. But even he was so caged in, when I was like, hey listen I just want to drive out to the country, cool? He was immediately on board. He said his goal for the day was to see something alive. Anything.

Which is exactly where we all are. For one week this was a city of fucking stir crazy fuckers.I mean, yeah we've all been sick of it for a while, but there's a difference between just being sick of it, or literally starting to act in sporadic irrational twitches. It's the city jitters.


So we drove to Wellington, cause I hadn't been out to the reservoir in a while. The drive there is so familiar to me, but it's all very different when you are the one driving. Every time I saw another building I recognized it all over again. We stopped at the weird gas station so I could piss, and I even remembered where the gum was and that really overly cheerful woman was working. We saw a Russian Poet wandering in the town square. The stretches where it's nothing but wet field and shrubs and silos, those are my favorite places. And like, every part of Ohio has a different color blue. There was some photographer filming the geese at the lake. I saw one small dead silver fish in the water, lapping up against the rocks. The geese were pairing up and being assholes. We walked around on the slightly squishy muddy grass for a little bit. A guy on a bike rode by with a pair of matching copper colored hounds running in front of him, off into the woods, after each other. Oh outside is so nice. Outside is just the best. I forget every year, and then it's like OH RIGHT THIS. I start typing in caps a lot, that sort of thing.



On the way back we stopped in at the Wellington City Hall and went inside, cause it was always there and I'd never been. Only it wasn't like a city hall at all. They had gutted most of it for a gym. There were kids playing basketball in there. And two narrow wooden staircases that took you up into a few redone offices, but everything was so small. It was like being in a dollhouse. The dimensions were shiny and stiff and made for much smaller men than a 7 ft tall Egyptian and fat faced me. But pretty, like a Lutheran Church. One of the old ones.





I got it into my head I wanted to drive to Norwalk, because really I wanted to go further to Bellevue and see the trains, but I knew we didn't really have time for that, cause we had city plans. But we did go to Norwalk, just to drive the main street a minute. Notice how at every small town, you think to yourself, hey, I could totally live here, this might be nice?

There's no counterpoint to that. I could totally live there. It might be nice.

But I mean, I'm probably not going to. This is my thought process every time we cross the city limits "I could totally live here. I love that city hall. Where the fuck would I work?" I mean, my Irish ancestors left the fields for a reason. And boom, there's your St. Patricks Day reference. Done.