Just three miles last night. I got home from work and it was cloudy. I dug through all my dirty clothes and found shorts but no shirt. I worried how I would look but by the time I went out it was dark anyway.

I have taken this route a hundred times now: Down capital heights, left on Steele or sometimes Florence street. After about a mile I start forgetting the roads and where I am. It doesn't matter as long I don't stop to think about it. In the past, especially on night runs, I would sometimes kept this creeping feeling of being lost. At a certain point it just becomes rote. I took a run a few months ago in a major downpour. It was amazing. My shoes sloshed through puddles and water just flowed all over me.

I was thankful for the dark because I didn't have to worry so hard about the GPS watch I have been wearing lately. It keeps great track of my movements but it sometimes hinders my thoughtlessness. Meanwhile, a loud patron yells into his phone. He wears an orange General Lee shirt. When not on his phone he tends to say "stop," and "quit," to his kid.

I should have done yard work yesterday. I should have gone out there with a rake and put leaves in piles and the set the piles on fire. There were sticks to pick up, probably trash from the street blown into bushes. I did manage to get a run in. A quick 3 miles. I don't remember the weather or anything; perhaps it was warm. Warm for January anyway.

I aimed to time my run so I ran past the 5:30 chimes at St. Joseph's Academy. A simple noise but one that seems to bring me further along each time I hear them. It was people watching and listening to the wind under the Bell Tower in the Parade Grounds at LSU that began to grow accustomed to the quarter hourly rings. Sometimes from my tiny apartment I could still here them, faintly. At that time I vowed to someday own a grandfather clock so I could hear those chimes forever. As a kid my grandparents had one, i want to say once my graddad died, my grandmother gutted the clock and turned it into a staple of country living design: plastic field mice running around it, fake apples and cakes planted inside on glass tables where the gears turned inside the clock. There are fake memories of a grandad I don't really know waking in the early morning to wind the clock, inserting a great key. Nonetheless I remember its chimes clearly. When I was living on Ovid street, our garage apartment backed up to a railroad track. I grew to love the sound of a passing train 30 yards from my bedroom. There were various kinds of train sounds: space train, old timey train, drunk conductor (He had to be drunk. This happened periodically: the conductor would pull open the whistle at intervals every five second: "Toot...Toot...Toot," you could hear the train just ambling down the night, miles away, "Toot...Toot...Toot," even half asleep this sound always made me laugh), sometimes a train would wait until it was right on our house to pull its whistle, starling you out of bed...but only for a second, and your dreams turned to train runs and dark canyons (always?). If you couldn't sleep you sometimes lay there and wait for that train. You hear it coming, and your fall asleep before it touches you. This train was in my head as I rounded through the streets through the garden district. Fast forward a mile and I see the same stretch of rails intersecting the long shallow street that connects Perkins with Lakeshore drive. Overall I went about 5 miles. My thoughts flooded me early, the blue chandelier hanging from the house on the corner of Steele and Capital Heights, the smart couple with the dog. Once I crossed Acadian I was in a different world. The sun was setting slowly and over my shoulder I could already see the full moon pale against the still blue sky. Thick slices of pink and orange marked the sky later with the moon getting brighter. I followed the moon after my turn around; first to my right shoulder and then later in front me. I used to make a similar run listening to John Cale. This was several years ago and i remember it being one of my better runs at the time. Instrumental music in layers. Now its more "one is the loneliest number," my Harry Nilsson (actually this didn't happen so much during the run, its on now. My dog chomps his food, my coffee is way too strong and I can't take my eyes off the wall). I think three dog night covered this song, Amy Mann in the movie Magnolia, me only once on an old keyboard without a real grasp of anything lyrically except "one," sorta moaned and shrugged over. Maybe weekly.?