After a long, nasty, cruel, heartless winter, here we are, the lion still gnawing at us and an hour of sleep lost to daylight savings.

For various reasons I couldn’t sleep last night. I sat up and stared out at the squatting cinderblock boxes with tarpaper roofs that pass for garages in this town, lining our alley in Siamese-twin pairs, and the false gloaming of the city lights diffused through the low-hanging clouds. And I cursed the grey night and laid back down, trying to block the alley street light’s amber glare with a wedged pillow.

I’ll be glad when this winter is dead and gone. The snow has finally thawed away from the shadows under the relentless rain, and the storm drains are clogged with urban jetsam and runoff with no place else to go, but there are still places where grey icebergs stand like Lot’s wife at street corners, like they’re waiting for the crossing light to change before they give up and melt into mud.

I know now why Brutus did in Caesar on the Ides. The goddamned Ides. It was the waiting for a change that drove him to do it. Something has to break, and let things start again.