Overcast day — typical — and knowing the mechanics of these things and how they work it could easily be sunny in twenty minutes. I was walking down a small back street and I saw a small tire — perhaps a tire from a grocery cart or some sort of trolley. It’s positioned upright to roll and I kicked it down in the direction of a side street. It wobbled along in frantic concentric circles and then disappeared. I moved on — clouds blackened overhead and I moved into scenes of stress, thinking about life, analyzing my time in this city — still an alien here and not knowing many people (although I don’t feel like the opposite of Sting — “A Canadian in London”) — upheavals and hardships over a period spanning several months; where is the world going? A population too big to allow the planet holding it to function properly — the new savages germinating on the streets, foaming at the mouth with piles of frantic technology — attention spans being whittled down to a toothpick of a personality.

I came out of all of this, drunk, sometime later down a backstreet in the same neighbourhood. Saggy drunks exercising the liberty to piss wherever they damn well please. Club-goers ogling over each other’s mobile phone photos. In the corner of my eye I caught something approaching me from the right. I looked, it’s the same tire still rolling back toward me. The runaway return. I stopped it with the sole of my shoe.

Seconds later my alarm clock goes off and I wake up in a silent room.

Speaking of runaway returns: