Thursday. And the first Thursday of the month. Streetsweeper Day.

Seems appropriate, this being the day after a particularly raucous Halloween scene in our neighborhood. I went full-bore yesterday on the house decorating. Boarded up the windows and dumped trash on our lawn. Neighbors drove by with raised eyebrows, and I got a solid approving smirk from the recycling truck driver, who was tempted to whip the can down off the truck at a mechanized speed that would create a windy whiplash of papers all a-flying. He didn't.

And it's Streetsweeper Day. Where we blow through this life and try and put some pieces of things back together. This old blog hit a sandbar nearly a decade ago, and has foundered since. Looks a little rusty, as I make my way through the cabin and sift through forgotten remnants of times past. There's a few other blogs in here, once started and soon abandoned. Old posts never posted. These things have just hung out there in the Interland, taking up space, darkening the Cloud.

Unfinished projects are my bane, and I've accumulated so many of them over this last decade that I swear my joints are finally giving out under the weight of them all. Old projects, with their half-baked inspiration, started and abandoned, still hold sway over a part of me. I've got an old garden, weedy and unkept. (When the sprinklers broke down I just walked!) I've got new parts on my work bench, that go on that old boat. I've got work materials, piled en masse, the same on this office desk. I've got breakfast to make for myself, (which I always skip and always pay for) and I've got unfinished exercise goals, unfinished business, unfinished laundry. And old relationships, long diminished, for lack of a single phone call.

Honestly, I'm surprised this old Blogger machination still works (does it?) Seems the world gave up on The Blog over a decade ago, in favor of the stripped-down, dumbed-down, mindless input of The Facebook machine -an appliance so misused over time that the simple (otherwise necessary) truths of communication and friendships were tossed thoughtlessly onto a cultural ash heap, and the real value of words and images kindling for its holocaust. Because Obama! TRUMP! These are crazy times.

That Streetsweeper just went by my window, as it has every first and third Thursday of the month since I've lived here, these fifteen years. The parking attendant drives close behind, and behind him those half awake pajama clad neighbors, moving their cars out of the way in our bi-weekly cul-de-sac parade. I suspect the Streetsweeper himself sees a few more candy wrappers on this Thursday, more than usual. And broken pumpkins, Halloween paraphernalia, holiday excess, which built up, wound up, reared back, and POPPED last night, in a frenzy of childhood memories made, and kept. The Streetsweeper moves ever-forward, unstoppable. I hear the rumble and hum of his machine in the distance, and he slows only for some larger pile of trash, or a car in the path -the car whose driver was unstirred this morning (after a heady night) to get up and move it, to get in line behind him. To get in that parade that trails the Streetsweeper, Grand Marshall of the Suburbs. A parade the Streetsweeper never slows for, pays no mind to, and never sees from the sidelines.


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