I didn’t go rock climbing tonight. I’ve rescheduled my play for after I get my work done. I am spending the night grading papers and drinking near beer. Clausthaler is the current favorite. They’ve been doing it the longest, so it stands to reason that they would be good, if not the best. I’ve had a moderately pensive day. No, that’s not the right word. Pensive implies some kind of contemplative anxiety and my state of mind has been internal, but not worried.

Sometimes when you are in a mood you go for long walks, let’s say that I’ve been doing that, only I do the walking, the roaming, in my head. It started when I was walking briskly up to the train platform this morning. It wasn’t exactly morning as I heard the bells chiming noon. The bells that I heard were the bells in the Carillon tower at Concordia Seminary.

When I was in high school I was a custodian for Concordia and one of my occasional jobs was to throw a rope down from the tower (very Rapunzel) to haul up a garden hose so I could wash off (and out) all the pigeon crap. Seventeen to thirty two and I live close enough to my past to literally still hear it in the distance while I wait for the train. Why is education so involved with waiting? It’s enough to make you take a mental wander through rare visited rooms of mental minutia and the memories of duties long ago discharged for 3.35 an hour.

That’s where I spend my wanders, in the alternate futures of each decision, no matter how small. In an alternate reality Einstein made a board game based on his theory of time, he called it “Adventures on Infinite Earths”. It’s the game I spend most days playing. The nice thing about games is that you can always start over. Every few years I shake the etch-a-sketch in an attempt to start over, but the first patters I drew always stay visible, and every new image is just a refraction of the old.