I was on the car ride from a belated pi day celebration; the house the party was being held at was maybe thirty five minutes from our house so I thought, why not, I guess it’s time for a nice optimistic night vibes wonky album to help settle me into the weekend where I work on transcribing the short story me and one of my friends wrote there onto a google doc from its original paper format. Anyway, as we drove through the dark glows of Cincy approaching its “large hours” so to speak, I put this on to drown out the terrible politically-relevant-but-equally-unsubtle and for whatever reason needlessly profane theater kid tumblrcore music my sister was playing. Eventually we passed the glam of downtown and drove back into the suburban crawls of apartments and brick houses with two lightbulbs on either side. The high pitched dancing synths complimented the night’s majesty.

My dad was real late to picking me up today; my school ends at 14:40 and he wasn’t there until 15:17. At about 15 I started listening to this because of how scrambled my brain was; the past three days have been nothing but tests in my three actually kind of difficult classes, however it seems I got a decent score on my AP World multiple choice, which is pretty sweet if you ask me considering Collegeboard is absolute hogwash + a classist scam. Anyway on my walk out I sat down on a hillside as I waited for my dad to pull up and started listening. The grass was a little muddy, but I sat down in it anyway because I’m too rigorous about maintaining my good posture to want to risk it by continuing to stand up with my backpack on. Light hail fell from the sky for just a couple minutes, at first people seemed to confuse it for snow.

I’m new to driving, I got my temps back in February, and so today was maybe my 10th or 11th time practicing although admittedly my first time in a couple weeks. Point being that today I finally did. Earlier today in an honors chemistry lab I accidentally got some silver nitrate crystals on my left hand therefore my left is now covered in tiny little black stars as if I was writing furiously with a ballpoint pen- which to be fair, I was, since I had an SAQ in AP World and I got all three questions answered. So today I had no homework by some incredibly lucky coincidence where the Honors Chemistry, Honors Algebra II, and AP World (Honors English III never gives out homework; the trademark of any good Advanced English class is that it’s too easy to ever require any homework that can’t be completed in under thirty seconds) gods all decided I was worthy of a day without any homework. Anyway, today I got to spend some time driving, and I put on this album as I drove with my mom to the park. I went at a good neighborhood speed of 15 mph average, stopped at the right places 90% of the time, eased into my breaks and only mixed up the brake and the accelerator while in a parking lot one time for two seconds. The only real difficulties were this crowd of fourth graders all playing basketball who, as kids often do, didn’t really seem to pay much mind to the 2 ton death mobile taking up the entire street since the people in my neighborhood are too stupid to know how to park in their garages and/or driveways and the roads are hardly two lanes (and too stupid to know how to drive without texting- or should I say, text without driving). At some point I barely made out a car which had right of way, and because of this inconvenience of having neighbors who don’t know what driveways are for, I ended up coming to a full stop at a weird angle since this person on the right side was parked only one empty car’s worth of space from the stop sign. But other than that, it was moderately uneventful, as most of my drives are. I guess it was my third time driving with music, if that counts for anything!

The latter half of our walk took us through more of the residential areas of downtown Cincinnati, mainly. Reminded o the industrial but angelic soundscapes of The Redeemer, I gave it a listen. Here we saw large three story houses with shining white walls and historical placard-esque signs hung in front of them as if they were national park sites instead of mansions; detached garages were like islands separated by seas of concrete. An old building- hardly even a room wide hung isolated yet closely to a cluster of houses. A 2 ton steel beam was sticking out of the red brick building abruptly, its weight I could determine as it donned a sticker reading “TWO TON.” Rain droplets accumulated in the air faint enough that the wind dispersed them into a nonexistent mist; an ethereal effect was created. We traversed a crosswalk armored with not one, rather two yield signs that went completely ignored by every driver running through the area.

There’s an eight mile walking trail thirty minutes away from our house which we’d been planning on going on but it wasn’t until about dinner time when I reminded my parents, so instead we just took the ten minute drive to downtown to do the history walk thing and see the statue of Cincinnatus. I, upon arrival, slid in a headphone and listened to Jesus Belluci/Limp Pumpo’s self titled (if you consider the artist Limp Pumpo and not Jesus Belluci) and begun our stroll. Why Limp Pumpo? The urban sounds but harsh disconnect from the world around you- we weren’t really *in* downtown Cincinnati, despite the fact we were, as we strayed towards the edges of town rather than the heart. We first made our way to a playground that had burned down fairly recently and progressed our way to a series of metal swings. And there we were. We crossed a rickety old bridge that trembled each step across it, seeing just how trash-full the mud deposits on each side of the opaque green Ohio river were.