author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Yesterday John says, he says to me, "Hey, so, I'm going to be doing thing-a-day." And I says, "What?" And he says, "Thing-a-day?" And I says, "No. What?"

And after a few more volleys along those lines the conversation settled down into a more informative groove, with him telling me all about Thing-a-day and me getting all enthused.

He's gonna do it. (He's doing it now. Hey look! And now he's done! For today, anyway.) And me, I'm gonna do it too. Maybe I didn't get to the Official Site in time to register for this year's session and have a cool Thing-a-day.com blog of my own, but, y'know, oh well. I have a blog here.

And, it being Feb. 1, I have a thing here. Here it is. It's a scene-thing, circa 530 words. Maybe I'll be doing Scene-a-day.

Most people didn't get off the bus here. All of the offices were empty, and many of them had been vandalized. The neon orange and red of gang tags glowed from the dusty, broken glass and crumbling pebbled facades. For those who didn't know how to read them, their scrawl still communicated loud and clear: don't be here after dark if you know what's good for you. All the locks were busted. None had seen their rightful keys all winter.

The cable news channels and the top-tier blogs called it "The bust after the boom after the bust," or simply "The second dot-com crash." It had left programmers, project managers, and technical writers without jobs. Business districts like this stood to no further purpose. Some of the signs you could still read: SineWave, WebNet, SpectralCore. Names that described nothing directly. Titles that appealed to an instinctual awe of the new and the shiny. Very little shone here now. The lawns were overgrown, the creek drowned in weeds, and the geese reigned supreme over grass and pavement. Why the bus even ran here at all was a mystery. The riders shrugged, called it a testimony to inertia, and waited for their stops. Their stops were further along, in retail and dining districts where business still flourished.

Closer inspection of the area revealed that a lot of the tagging was nearly as old as the bust, and the turf wars had already migrated east. Newer marks were subtler. A tracker might have sussed them out, or a bravely curious pedestrian might have observed the tracks being laid. For instance:

...inside an office formerly belonging to an online guerilla advertisement company, the handholds on the rock climbing wall that ascended beside the central stair were suspiciously well maintained. The ropes looped over the top bar were new. Each dawn found fresh handprints in the chalk.

...inside what used to be a broadcasting studio, down a windowless and electricity-less corridor, each recording booth had been altered. Where computers, microphones, and mixers once stood, there were now mechanical potters' wheels installed in the countertops. Red clay piled to the ceiling. On the walls were niches for tools, shelves for drying the greens, and sconces for the ten, fifteen, twenty candles per booth that gave the sculptors light.

...inside the former FedEx depot was a nest of generators gently humming, gently waiting for a neighbor squatter to ask it to do its job. The smell of gas filled the small storage space. A web of wires led to the closest buildings where electrical inventions underwent development. A cache of fuel and spare parts suggested a system of scavenge and contribution.

And the industry inside the buildings wasn't all there was to see. The crash had taken place late last summer, and the gangs had given up the space to the artisans some three or four months later. The frost hadn't left the ground yet, but you could see compost piles here and there, if you knew where to look. If you knew how to look. You could see that the shrubbery beds had been turned and tilled. They were waiting for seed-sowing time.

Of course, tomorrow, who knows, tomorrow might find me quilting. Or knitting. Or baking, even. But I'm guessing that the majority of my things will be writing-things, like this thing here.

It's a good thing, doing things like this every day.