April Sweeps - Day 88

Not much time to blog today (or rather, I waste too much time blogging as it stands).

Before I start feeling sorry for myself, let me first post this excellent photo I took Sunday evening:

It's the mountain with the sun setting behind it and a streetlight in the foreground, but it went all flat and black and white and looks like an album or book cover to me.  I just like the stark contrast of it.*

"Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog,
Where no one notices the contrast of white on white."  -Counting Crows

So, I just got rid of the phone today.  I had given the lady a full twenty-four hours to answer me on Facebook (whether she was the owner or not), and waited for the damned thing to ring pretty much all day yesterday, but nobody called again after Sunday.  Somebody online suggested I take it to the police station and let them deal with it, and this afternoon, that's what I decided to do.

I drove over to the local constabulary, and spoke to a guy through a bulletproof (hopefully, Coronaproof) partition, telling him the deal.  He told me I had done the right thing, but to go outside, pick up the (also hopefully-Coronaproof) payphone and dial Dispatch.  I did so, told them it wasn't an emergency, and waited until someone could help me.  The operator heard my story, then asked where I found the phone.  When I told them, he said, "Oh, sorry, that's not us.  The County Sheriff has jurisdiction over that area."

So, they wouldn't take the phone.  Instead, they sent a deputy over to my house to fill out the paperwork and take the phone off my hands.  He was surprised--in an irritating way--when I told him I had found the phone on Sunday, and hadn't turned it in until Tuesday.**  He said with the debit card and medical insurance card, they'd track the owner down.  I nearly asked, "If you don't, can I have the phone?" but I didn't.

So now, with no stranger's phone to distract me, I am supposed to write.  Sure don't want to, though.  I'm afraid we've reached the end of this daily writing experiment.  I'm just tired of it, I no longer feel inspired, and I feel I've accomplished both jack and squat in equal portions this month.

What have I accomplished, exactly?  I'm talking about life here, not since I started writing every day and posting about it.

I was too tired to write more than 700 words, so I got ready for bed, setting aside the recording I was going to do for the next Patreon-only episode of my podcast.  But just as I sat down on the bed, I thought I'd jot down a paragraph or two on my Christmas story, which I haven't worked on at all this week (and ooh, the deadline is fast approaching--since it'll be May soon, and that's only seven months away from Christmas).

But I surprised myself by writing a bit about a 1972 Plymouth Valiant (like the one below), and before I knew it, I had crossed the thousand word threshold for the first time in days.

So, it's only 2:37am, but I'm doing better on my writing today . . . and nearly feeling okay about myself.  Wouldn't that be nice?

Words Today: 1152
Words In April:  30,834

P.S. For some reason, I post one of these each day:

Day 28: A song by an artist whose voice you love. "Faithfully" by Journey.  I thought about a number of singers who have voices that just speak to me, and decided, in the end, that Steve Perry had the greatest voice of the Eighties.  I figured somebody might argue with me, bringing up Freddie Mercury, who might have had a wider range than Perry, but still doesn't get my vote.

*This reminds me: I heard somebody bitching the other day about Instagram, and how it has devolved into this thing where hot chicks take selfies every day and idiots take pictures of their food (which, frankly, is what I thought it was always supposed to be for).  Apparently, when it was first created, Instagram was intended for photographers to upload the pictures they took, showcasing their work.  But what a shame, every moron with a smartphone now thinks they can take pictures and upload them and people will oooh and ahhh, because they took a photo of the sunset.  Or they used one of the Instagram filters and now they're Annie Liebowitz.
But you know what?  Screw you guys.  I took that top picture with a crappy phone, and didn't use any filters, and that fugger could totally go up on Instagram.  And maybe I'll take a selfie now too, just to continue to piss off the bourgeoisie.  A selfie of my taint.

**That made me wish I just kept the phone and traded it in at GameStop when and if the GameStops ever open again.  You get why I didn't, right?