What I should be doing with myself is buying a pub, maybe this pub, and naming it “Plan B.” That, or “The Drunken Pony.”

I’ve had no luck finding a new teaching job, so I was thinking I might do something different for a while, maybe be caretaker at some big, remote house. The wife and the kid and I could get away from the crazy, crowded, frustrating world to someplace quiet. I’d get some writing done, we’d be alone with ourselves, the works. It became more idyllic and alluring the longer I thought about it. But then my idea started to sound a little familiar…

A telephone pole is peeling into weathered gray sheets thin as the Lost Dogs and Yard Sales stapled up over years, and there’s at least one strip of wood for each conversation that ever passed through its wires.

First a passing car splashed me from behind, soaking the backs of my legs with freezing cold snowmelt and rain. Then a second car splashed me from the front, just in case. The third car I heard coming, and saw its front wheel hit the puddle and fan water into the air in time to close my eyes before the wave drummed my head and rolled down my collar. But when I got to the intersection in front of my house only to find it flooded, meaning I’d have to wade through, I shook my fist at the sky because that’s just too many metaphors all in a row.

Frozen porch boards groan at just the right pitch to talk me out of leaving the house, and huddled clumps of birds in the bushes chirrup nearly the right notes to come inside for the day.

Snow melted all day before getting caught by the cooling of evening; now heavy mist hangs like the world’s first few feet have been whitewashed.

All at once every tree on our street has let go of its leaves, so it looks like the sunrise was shattered and its colors are snowing from the sky in small pieces. And later on it is actually snowing, as if the dust stirred up by that shattering is coming down after the leaves.

On the train two women sit side by side, one dressed in purple from head to toe and the other in black from the shadowed floor up, each with a totebag between her feet and one of them reading Angels on Earth magazine while the other reads a biography called Scar Tissue. It looks like the sort of pairing that should mean something, but it probably doesn’t.

On the subway platform a man stands as if frozen with his back to a column, eyes shut tight and gloved fists held in front of his body, a watchcap on his head and a bright, beatific grin on his face for reasons none of us in the column of commuters splitting around him seem to understand.

Two old men walk together through a city park littered with yesterday’s victory parade, beneath branches webbed with white paper, upon footpaths petalled red with confetti, and one of them says to the other, “She’s lonely because she’s pushed the whole world away from her, that’s why.”