Airport terminals are my least favorite null spaces, counting their uniformly loud and echoey but not resonant acoustics, arbitrary uses of personal space, cruel and slap-happy approaches to time given its import. This makes folks who work there into puzzles on two legs, nominally upright but not.

Sore, so much so that I did the standing desk thing for the first time in months, and grouchy not from work but from having to look up and listen to someone insistent about it but weaselly so. I’d rather diffident but forthright, but here we are, yes? I’d missed yesterday’s, but here came today’s.

Up early and in earlier because the only way to run through the day is to run straight at it, build up momentum and let it carry you forward across the bridge, through the tunnel, around crowd members and into the individual perspective as it’s encountered, from street corner to barstool to bed.

When you know you’re walking and talking tomorrow, it’s good to shut up and be still for as much of today as you can. It’s the same advice the cat would have given me if we were on speaking terms. As such, we both made do with her purrs and meows and lap hops to my chin scratches and belly rubs.

The year has turned on several of its invisible hinges, 5 o’clock sunsets aside: a heater hauled down from a high shelf; teeth cleaned, with a return appointment set for six months out; an air ticket purchased to an alternate past. Next comes last year’s rains, returning for us high as passions.

Local news often means real 9th house type stuff: far journeys, publishing open minds, exchanging concepts across distances higher education. But of course its opposite is built in: a walk around the block, a quick hunt for an exchange of local thoughts, or an idea seeking bounds and bounce backs.

Everything needs fuel, even my car when I watch the folks inside the station dialing in a new twenty cent cheaper price less than five minutes after I’ve finished topped off my tank. Do I treat my frustration like fuel? Do I let it fuel something else? No, I do what it lets me do. I keep it moving.

Out a newsroom window, a skateboarder bodysurfs a car in an intersection. Then sirens you follow eventually lead to a flat-tired G-Wagon. Later, a quiet karaoke night gets spiked by a long lost duet partner and his son, and cops talking about “Labyrinth” and a double round of gunshots.

Somewhere, the easier day is shining down in someone else, rays of glory and beauty piercing clouds and landing on folk with epiphanies and breakthroughs and lottery numbers, or maybe just encouragement against long odds and low opinions and difficult, newly darker nights. I bet it’s the antipodes.

Rain dawdled and dragged its heels before shrugging off cloud cover and committing to the bit, right before a sit-down on the same block where I took it in the teeth twentysome years ago. The gig was also good then, but a few things are better even as other stuff has (been) worsened, maybe even me.