I like to walk late at night because after 10 p.m., I don’t have to deal with people walking their stupid dogs. I have the streets to myself. The one downside to walking late at night, though, is that there are no bathrooms open. I pass by two grocery stores and two parks. One of the stores closes at 10 p.m., and the other has a lock on the bathroom door that requires asking an employee for the code. The park ranger locks up the bathrooms at the parks by 8 p.m. Except tonight, that is.

I don’t know why, but both bathrooms were open, so I took advantage of the rare opportunity. I don’t know why they can’t just be open all the time. Literally, everyone has to pee. Why do bathrooms have business hours?

When I was done, I crossed back over the street to continue my walk, and the very first person I saw was a guy peeing in the parking lot across from the unlocked public restroom across the street. I’ve never seen that before in that parking lot, so why tonight, of all nights?

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It’s a house in Riverside, CA.

It would be such an epic prank to pick up the trunk and deliver it to that address. Surely, the current residents would try to dispose of it, but how great would it be if they got rid of it and it turned up at their house again, and again, and again?

In 2013, we had a garage sale, and our neighbors, whom we had recently become friendly with, came over to see what we were selling. Their daughter picked up a creepy-looking doll, but despite our encouraging them to take it, they refused.

They went home, and we noticed that they had left their garage door open, so we snuck across the street and placed the doll in their garage refrigerator. Then, we went back home and waited with giddy anticipation for them to discover the doll and retaliate. We had started what we hoped would be a year-long prank wherein we would each discreetly hide the doll in each other’s houses like a perpetual game of elf-on-the-shelf, but it went nowhere.

They found the doll in their refrigerator and didn’t react at all. It was such a letdown. This trunk thing would end similarly because humor in America died long ago.

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The squirrels will bite the heads off of the stalks and take them to various parts of the wall where they will chew the seeds out of the flower and leave huge messes of sunflower guts all over the ground below, which I get to clean up. Then, in July, the ones that haven’t been decapitated will begin their inevitable demise. That’s when the real fun begins: pulling them up.

Sunflower roots don’t go very deep, but occasionally you get a big one that puts up a fight. The real problem, though, is what to do with them. They’re so damn big, they don’t all fit in the yardwaste bin at once, so I either have to cut them up which takes time, or pull them out in stages which is usually what I do because they die in stages. So, one day a week for pretty much all of July and August, I get to wrestle giant flowers in the heat of summer.

Hopefully, we don’t get another summer like 2023 when Hurricane Hilary made landfall in California at the end of August, dousing the desert in my backyard and starting the cycle of life all over again, six months early. I spent my whole autumn and winter pulling weeds that year.

Yay, it’s summertime again. God, I’m a miserable son of a bitch.

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A few years ago, I was encouraged when Lowe’s prompted me to select whether I wanted a printed receipt or to have my receipt emailed to me. I joyfully selected email. They have since changed the options to printed or printed & emailed. Why?! I don’t want your stupid little piece of paper. It’s no different to me than if they handed me the wrapper their lunch came in. Thanks, I’ll just take this home and throw it away for you.

All of my bills are paperless, but that doesn’t stop all the mail from coming to my house. The occasional privacy policy, disclosure, or notice still shows up. And of course, someone is still wasting their money sending me junk mail.

Maybe, just maybe, before I die, I’ll finally be free of all paper.

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Unfortunately, this year’s Spring cleaning will have to be continued on Sunday because I had to order a couple of cables that won’t be here until then. I already ran a fish line through the wall, though, so when they come, hooking them up should be a snap.

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That’s why when I saw this display of gold and silver balloons, I just thought, oh yeah, it’s New Year’s again. It took a second to register that it’s the middle of May. I had to take a closer look and saw that the balloons all say some variation of graduation on them.

Why doesn’t graduation season get its own color scheme? It’s off-putting to see the colors of winter in late Spring. Graduation season should be purple and royal blue, maybe some burgundy, and then a little bit of gold for contrast. Okay, chop chop people, get on it.

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I made the original walkway out of old pallets back in 2015. I knew the untreated, unfinished wood wouldn’t last forever, but I’m satisfied with how long it lasted. I had hoped to be able to take up the old, broken planks and replace them with new ones, but when I started taking them up, I discovered the stringers were severely rotten, too. One of them almost completely returned to the Earth.

I’m rebuilding the walkway with Trex leftover from another project. I don’t have enough to do the whole thing, but I don’t care. As long as I can redo the stretch from the patio to the fire pit, I’ll be satisfied. That’s the most heavily used part. The rest can be done later.

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