I dropped all my leaves in the fall*

*didn’t make a cent at market.

My birthday is in the early spring.

This is, many times over, the winter of my 21st year.

There was something that I was thinking, which, originally, was more in reference to this, an actual season, than what these preceding ideas would attempt to impart on you.

Pat finally said it out loud, almost word for word from the stock ticker function running across my frontal lobe.

It’s nice to have him around to do this reading sometimes. I couldn’t possibly compute all of that binary, and I never did get good at making out the streaming information backwards in the mirror.

"I feel like I’ve been sitting in the same position for a really, really long time."

The following week we left for a 2500 mile road trip. The truck was overflowing with boxes of useless home decor. We were so loaded with fake fruit, ornamental dishes, waxy plastic plants, and gold colored Styrofoam frames of mirrors that our seats couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t, recline.

It’s as if the vehicle was one big blind spot that was expressly designed to manufacture cricks in the neck. A mobile Freudian nightmare painting* with peep holes for eyes so that we could watch the passing landscape through five states… completely undetected**. We would have gotten away with it to… if it weren’t for those meddling kids.

On the way home we did discover that the seats were heated.

*You know the one… a sleeping virgin… a shadowy monster defined by twin ocular beacons glowing orange through the haze of the background.

** Does this piece need restoration, or is it just my blunted palette?